Florida is having a cold snap, and apparently there's been a rash of dogs showing up at vet clinics with paralysis. After several weeks of this, vets are starting to think it's because of the iguanas. See, iguanas don't handle temperatures near freezing well; there's a lot of iguanas in southern Florida (who knew?), so there's dying iguanas falling out of trees and frozen stiff. Then dogs find them and think these are the greatest chew toys ever!
However, carcasses are also great incubators for botulinum bacteria, so the dogs get botulism (maybe...there's actually no confirmed clinical data, but it seems to make sense). Most of the dogs can recover, but it takes a week or two for the paralysis to wear off.
Oh, the joy of Promed Mail. Keeping me entertained when the snow plows wake me up too early.
3 comments:
Oh, that's gross. I can just picture all these dogs running around with frozen iguana legs dangling from their mouths as they gnaw on the body! My dogs are all such little hoovers, I don't know what I'll do when we finally have a yard where they can play unsupervised -- at least living in the city means they only go outside on a leash, and I can see (most of the time) when they're about to eat something!
Hey, at least iguana legs are shorter than deer legs, which is what my dogs like to drag home from the woods! (To clarify--the deer were already dead, the dogs were just lucky enough to find the scraps the coyotes left)
Thanks for clarifying -- I would be extremely impressed if your dogs actually took down a deer! :)
One of my friends has an Anatolian shepherd, who's probably bigger than most deer, and he sort of got one once. He was still a puppy, just full-grown, and he chased it over a fence and it fell and broke its neck on the other side. :( The fence was too tall for the dog to jump, so he didn't even get to touch his deer. And my friend wasn't sure if it was safe to eat a deer that had been killed in that manner (I'm not sure why), so I don't think he even did anything with the carcass.
This is a very sad story, now that I think about it -- nobody really got any benefit from it and the deer died for nothing. :(
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