Don’t s–t where you eat … or where a dog might eat.
A San Francisco dog owner issued a foul warning to other local pet parents after her pooch, Pockets, became sick from eating human waste tainted with marijuana and opioids at a city park — a stinky situation her vet said was “relatively common.”
While playing with her 1-year-old Himalayan sheepdog poodle mix at Fort Mason on Thursday, Jackie Shepard noticed her pup had started noshing on something unpalatable — poop.
“I noticed she was eating something, so I ran over to see what she was eating and, unfortunately, it was poop,” Shepard told ABC 7 News.
Since dogs tend to eat whatever they can get their snouts on, Shepard wasn’t too worried about Pockets — until hours later when the pup began to seem sick.
“At about 8 o’clock, she was wobbling, and her tail was down. Something was definitely wrong with her,” Shepard said.
Shepard brought the pooch to an emergency vet, who ran tests that showed Pockets had symptoms of marijuana intoxication. There were also opioids in her system.
“Essentially, the doctor on that night told me that this was relatively common, and she sees it a few times a week,” Shepard said.
Fortunately, Pockets didn’t ingest enough of the contaminated feces to need Narcan and quickly reverted to her playful self.
A health care professional told ABC 7 that Shepard did everything right — and said that had the dosage been bigger, Pockets could have suffered kidney or liver damage.
“There are so many people with dogs who probably don’t know this is a threat to their dogs, so I wanted to share to spread awareness, people can be really careful and watch out for symptoms of this,” Shepard said.
