Vet help: Dog eats cannabis-riddled human faeces at park

Yuri the Cavoodle started to stumble around the house after his owner, Emma, took him to the park.Source:Supplied

IT was supposed to be like every other morning walk before work.

Leaving home at 6.30am, Emma and her two-year-old Cavoodle, Yuri, set off for North Melbourne Football Oval to exercise before she started her shift.

“Usually I run him on the oval ... but on this morning, he made a beeline for the hill,” Emma, who didn’t want to disclose her surname, told news.com.au.

“He went straight for a big turd, which normally he’d sniff and move on. But with this one, he ate it.”

Emma said that she collected Yuri and brought him back down to the oval to continue his exercise, before heading home to get ready for work.

“When we got home, I went to get his food ready and his head started to wobble,” she explained.

Yuri had to have an $800 procedure to get the human faeces out of his intestine.

Yuri had to have an $800 procedure to get the human faeces out of his intestine.Source:Supplied

“I thought it looked strange, and so I kept an eye on him. He then jumped off the couch and looked a bit funny ... and got progressively worse. He started trembling, and was sensitive to me — almost like her had lock jaw. It was like he was in another zone.”

Concerned, Emma called the vet and asked for an emergency visit. Jumping in a taxi, Yuri’s body started to become a “dead weight” as they travelled to the clinic.

“The vet brought me in to a room and put him on a table,” she explained.

“She said straight off the bat he’d ingested cannabis and needed to make him vomit.”

Unsure where Yuri could’ve ingested the drug, Emma left her beloved dog in veterinary care so they could get him on saline and clear his stomach.

“Later that day, I got a text message that Yuri had cannabis in his urine,” she said.

“She said drugs can be expelled through poo and that it’s not uncommon.”

Two-year-old Cavoodle, Yuri.

Two-year-old Cavoodle, Yuri.Source:Supplied

Emma claims she went back to the oval to examine the excrement that Yuri had been eating earlier that day, and see how much her dog had consumed.

“There was toilet paper next to it,” she explained.

“When I first saw it I thought it was a dogs, but then looking at it I could see it was human ... and apparently there’s something in human poo that dogs are attracted to.”

Veterinarian Melanie Hill fromSwan Street Vet Clinicsaid while she didn’t treat Yuri and hadn’t come across many similar cases, marijuana poisoning is common in pets.

“We certainly get dogs come in to the vet practice that are stoned,” she said.

“It’s more commonly marijuana and that is because people make hash cookies and stuff and to dogs that’s a real treat.

“When I was working in the emergency centre we’d see it pretty frequently”.

Hill said that while dogs often eat cat faeces, she said human waste consumption wasn’t overly common.

“I haven’t heard of that many cases of dogs eating human poo,” she said.

“Dogs like cat poo because it has a lot of protein in it but I wouldn’t usually think a dog would go for human poo … but then again dogs will eat pretty disgusting things … they’ll eat dead possums so they would probably eat a human poo.”

Yuri had traces of cannabis in his system.

Yuri had traces of cannabis in his system.Source:Supplied

In 2013, vets in Berlin, Germany, released a warning about a high number of dogs eating faeces in a number of the parks around the city.

Dogs that were walked in certain areas like the Kreuzburg and Treptow region, were being poisoned, because the areas often attract drug users that occasionally used the bushes as a toilet.

Speaking to The Local at the time, veterinarian Reinhold Sassnau said dogs also displayed symptoms of dehydration and a rapid heartbeat, caused by the drugs.

But while Yuri is on the mend, Emma said she will be keeping him on a short leash next time they go to the park.

“He will only go on the oval now,” she said.

“Hopefully no one will hang a turd on the football oval, but stranger things have happened.”