Hi,

We recently made playdough for our son. The recipe was 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup salt, water, oil, cream of tartar.

Unfortunately, we were surprised to find out that our dog ate it. We did not think much of it, we thought that at worst it might give her a belly ache and cause her to vomit. We were shocked and horrified when she became seriously ill and started having seizures. I rushed her to a veterinarian and learned that a high level of salt in her system was causing the seizures. Her serum sodium levels were were well beyond the safe threshold and we could expect her to have significant brain damage if she was to survive the effort to suppress her seizures and reduce her sodium levels, which would take days. At this point we felt that we had little option other than to euthanize her.

I feel that we lost our pet because of our ignorance. If we knew better we could have prevented the situation or at least acted quickly to get her medical attention. All of our friends were surprised to learn that homemade playdough could be toxic to dogs. An article was published in the Journal of Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care, September 2004, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 196-202(7) "Hypernatremia secondary to homemade play dough ingestion in dogs: a review of 14 cases from 1998 to 2001." You can read the free abstract of the article.

I hope that you will update your websites to include a warning with the recipe indicating that it is potentially attractive and toxic to dogs so that people will know that it should be handled with care and will avoid the ordeal that we went through.

Thank you for reading this message,

Joseph Nardone

PS My wife has worked with developmentally disabled individuals and has known some that might be capable of eating playdough and wondered if the ingestion of playdough might have the same toxic effect on a developmentally disabled child.