I work in a late night pharmacy and we’ve been getting customers asking about k1 because their dog ate rat poison and their vet suggested it We don’t stock it so I try to urge them to go to an emergency vet anyway but is this something a vet would suggest or are they just googling it? Some sites say it can be treated with k1 tablets but should the dog still be seen as soon as possible to make sure there are no other problems or complications and that to correct treatment and dosages are given?

drferox:

Well, I’ve had people swear black and blue they’ve been unable to get their dog to a vet at the time they’ve eaten a vitamin K antagonist rat poison and advised them to get vitamin K the next morning, but always from a vet clinic. Generally speaking the advice would be to get the dogs in, make them vomit, provide activated charcoal (and a lot of it), and then discuss a clotting time blood test a day or two down the track.

Doing this for a dog during the day at general practice might be $100-150 or so. At an emergency clinic on a more expensive public holiday, $250-300 or so.

Just putting them on vitamin K1, for a 10kg dog, is expensive as depending on the poison you might need to treat for 12 weeks, and then do a blood test 2 days after stopping treatment to ensure the dog is in the clear. And most commercial rat poison here needs at least 8 weeks treatment. For a 10kg dog, that’s going to be around $800. Double that for a 20kg dog, and so on.

So I will always advise people to bring their dogs in ASAP because it actually saves a chunk of money. Also, people have this tendency to think that because the dog is ‘fine’ the next day it doesn’t actually need treatment, when in reality it might take 2 days to several weeks to manifest symptoms. I need to drill into people that vitamin K antagonist rodenticides take a long time and need a long treatment and by the time you see symptoms you’re already up for thousands of dollars worth of blood and plasma transfusions.

My suspicion is that they are probably just googling it. If the dog ate it within the hour, making it vomit and decontaminating it is the best route, at a vet clinic. If it ate it the day before, they are probably ok to start Vitamin K1 the next morning.

However, I’ve seen a dog that was presented for just eating rat poison, when it at also eaten some a few days earlier, and presented actively starting to bleed and needed plasma transfusions in addition to K1 to survive. If you know the dog is poisoned, there’s really no justification in avoiding the vet.