Print edition: 
Drilled into every pet owner’s head is that chocolate can be extremely harmful, even deadly, to a dog if it is ingested. The tale goes that if your dog eats even a small piece of chocolate lying around the house as part of your holiday decor, you have to rush it to an emergency hospital to save its life.
This is actually a more dramatic scenario than the average holiday chocolate would cause.
The toxic ingredient in chocolate is the theobromine substance that is similar to caffeine, but it is not a poison like arsenic. It can cause irregular heartbeat, agitation, heavy panting and muscle tremors. The most toxic kind of chocolate is baker’s chocolate, since that kind, in its purest form, has the most theobromine in it.
The milk chocolate that treats are made of has very little chocolate in it, and a dog would have to eat a great deal of it to have any ill effects. Usually it’s the wrappings that cause the problems. I once left a bowl of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses out, and Dump Truck, one of my dogs, ate the whole bowl of them. (He did not bother to peel the foil off.) This resulted in a trip to the emergency vet hospital in the middle of the night. The hospital kept him for a couple of days and monitored him for any ill effects of the theobromine and took a couple of X-rays to be sure all the foil had passed. Like most accidents, it could have been prevented if I had been proactive about keeping all holiday sweets out of reach.
I get many queries from pet owners about guests who feed their dogs from holiday tables. Here’s what I tell them:
When my dear mother-in-law was alive, she loved to feed my dogs from her plate, and I loved her too much to make her feel bad about it. I worked things out by putting a small dish next to her place setting with some dry meat or poultry in it and some steamed, cut-up vegetables. I told her to go ahead and feed the dogs all she wanted — but only from that dish. The bland foods did not upset their digestion as other “people food” might. This kept my mother-in-law happy, made the dogs happy and kept peace in the house.
