After eating a few cannabis cakes under a bush on a walk, a dog was fighting to survive.
Sarah Kenny was walking her Jack Russell in a park near her home earlier this month after he darted off into a bush.
But the 45-year-old quickly realized something was off once they got home and Max was not himself.
The Veterinary nurse Sarah shared:
“It’s a bush he always goes into so I let him off the lead to have a sniff around, he’s always chasing after rabbits so when he took a while to come out it didn’t raise my suspicion. He looked fine even when we came back from the walk, I took him home and he was fast asleep – we’d been out for at least three hours so I thought he must be shattered.”
“But I went for a nap myself, and a few hours later my partner came and woke me up and told me something wasn’t right with Max. He looked really nervous and shaky, he couldn’t stand up without falling back over.”
Sarah then realized what had happened after smelling Max, sharing:
“He looked off his face, it did seem like he was on drugs but I was dismissing it in my head thinking ‘that’s not possible’. As soon as we started getting him ready to go to the vets he started throwing up. I could tell that it was chocolate which immediately raised alarm but then I smelt this really distinctive smell and I knew it was cannabis. I hadn’t seen what he’d eaten in the bush before but when he was sick we knew straight away it must have been a lot of cake.”
Vets then confirmed that Max had consumed a psychoactive substance and he was taken to Rutland House Veterinary Hospital in St. Helens where he was given medication to force him to throw up the remaining cake before being placed on a drip and kept overnight under the watch of experts.
Thankfully, Max was released the next day and made a full recovery. But Sarah and the story could have been much different if they had not reacted fast.
She said:
“There’s a good chance that he would have gone into organ failure and died if we hadn’t reacted as quickly as we did. It was awful to watch him go through, no pet owner wants to see their pet in distress but I kept telling myself he’s a little fighter and he would pull through. It could have been someone else’s dog who might not have been able to spot the signs as well or worse yet it could have been a child. There were children in the park that day and I’ve just got this vision in my head of a child messing around in the bushes and seeing that and thinking it was chocolate. That could have been horrific.”
