Beyond Chocolate: Hidden Halloween Hazards for Pets

Some serious dangers for your pets. Tracy Murray, dog behavior and safety expert and founder of Saving Fido Dog Walking, joins us with some tips to keep your pets safe and calm as well this Halloween season. Thanks for joining us, Tracy. Glad to have you here with us. Hi, Jacqueline. Thank you so much for having me back. I'm really glad to be here. Yeah. So let's start with a little bit of what we're getting into here when it comes to the treats and how those can be a hazard for your pet. Absolutely. So the first thing to think about is the sugar free stuff. It sounds like like it's good for us, but it's actually really bad for our dogs. So we want to look out for xylitol, which is sometimes in gum, sometimes in peanut butter, and it's really dangerous for our pets. So that's a definite no. The second thing, raisins. They sound like they're good for us. They're healthy for us, but for our dogs, they can make them really, really sick. Right. I'm not a vet. Like a grape. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. 100%. I'm not a vet, but if your dog ever gets to either of those anything sugar-free any grapes any raisins contact your vet immediately okay i know a lot of people do give their pets uh peanut butter right as a distraction but there are some safe alternatives out there and peanut butter itself is okay you just want to make sure it's not sugar-free okay so you want to check the label and make sure it doesn't say xylitol or birch sugar anything like that those are the tricky ones that are no for your dog good to to know. What's happening here with the wrappers? So with the wrappers, so you know, when we have candy, we open the wrappers, right? We take the candy out. Our dogs bless their hearts. They just eat all of it. The whole thing, right? Just gobble it all up. And the wrapper gets stuck in their tummy, gets stuck in their gut and cause a lot of long-term problems. So we want to make sure we don't let them get wrappers. As a dog mom, and you're a dog mom too, right? I always have treats in my pocket. So whenever they get something that they want, we're not going to snatch it from them. we're going to give them the treat and we're going to trade. Okay. That's perfect. That makes sense. The other thing is I see these a lot, especially with the kiddos. Yeah. So glow sticks, which are really pretty, but dogs might think, oh, I wonder what that is. And when they wonder what something is, they're going to put it in their mouth. The chemicals in here can make them sick. They can give them diarrhea. They can make their mouth all just bad. And we don't want that to happen. So again, have the treats in your pocket, make sure they don't get these things. And if they do we trade I've seen some people right they'll put if they've got a little dog they'll put this on like a collar just to kind of light them up but you don't want to do that with this and there are safer alternatives exactly there are battery and led operated alternatives that don't have the chemicals in it and these only last for a couple of hours anyway but they have the liquid inside and we just we want to be safe rather than sorry uh this next this sign that you have here I I don't know why I've never thought of that as somebody who has a reactive dog this is a brilliant an idea and it's so simple too. I know it's just like completely just logical but you don't think of it but for your dog the doorbells are ringing 5, 10, 20, 25, 30 times and people have on costumes they're like what is happening? Right. So you can help them on Halloween by putting up a sign like this. You're going to trust people to not take all the candy but you put the candy in there and then you don't have to worry about it and then your dog can be in the house somewhere nice safe warm in the back of the house with some treats that they really love and then you don't have to worry about that yeah great idea give them one of those like uh treat things where you can put some frozen safe peanut butter in it let them go to town exactly uh okay what's next that we're talking about here that's the last thing to think about and it kind of blows our mind sometimes but november 1st so halloween is when all the candy is out right but november 1st we go on that first walk we think everything's okay imagine all the candy that's on the ground that all the kids drop and your dog's like, hey, this is really exciting. Free-for-all. So, again, we have to look out for that. Another thing to think about that I didn't quite cover before, candles. Sometimes we put candles in our pumpkins because they're really cool and everything. That's a good point. You know? Yeah. But our dogs with the waggy tails, you know, something bad is going to happen. The scared, you know, ones out there as well. So think battery-operated. Think battery-operated candles. Think battery-operated lights. Think about being safe. and that way you can make Halloween fun for you and your dog. Right. You know, during 4th of July, we hear a lot of the fireworks go off. Now it's the spooky costumes, the doorbells, all of those things. So just keep top of mind your kids, your dogs, my four kids. My two. Exactly. So where can people find more information from you, Tracy? We appreciate you giving us this little feel this morning. I love being here. Saving Fido Dog Walking is my company. Okay. And you can look online. We have lots of blog posts. We have things about reactive dogs and how to make Halloween fun for your dog. It's always fun for the kids. It's kind of fun for us, but we can make it fun for our dogs as well. Good to know. I love this idea. I will be implementing this. There's where you can find more with Tracy and Saving Fido Dog Walks. Thank you. Thank you.