Fall Pet Safety Tips: Ensuring Your Pet’s Safety Around Common Autumn Hazards
It’s safe to say that people organize their lives, and the myriad activities, around the weather. For fall, this means football games, raking leaves, and enjoying a little more snuggle time. It’s a wonderful time to enjoy both the outdoors and the delights of a warm kitchen. Nights are getting longer, days are getting chillier, and with our fall pet safety tips, pets are staying healthy.
The Look of Fall
Please be aware that any fall decorations can become very enticing to curious, bored or opportunistic pets. Things like jack o’lanterns, Halloween lights, animatronic displays, and items that attach to the house or hang from trees don’t make sense to pets. They may react with confusion, aggression, fear, or playfulness, all of which can result in them destroying decor or ingesting things accidentally.
Wreathes, garlands, ornamental corn, candles, potpourri, and even scarecrows should be used sparingly during fall to protect a pet’s safety.
Chocolate Goodies
Chocolate candies and sugar-free goodies (containing Xylitol) should always remain strictly off-limits to pets. Please keep an eye out for any discarded candy wrappers, and watch for changes to your pet’s appearance or behavior.
Fatty Foods
Various holiday foods can lead to dangerous health problems in pets. Anything fatty or rich in flavor (butter, meat) should never be offered to pets as a way to prevent pancreatitis or GI upset. Always provide healthy alternatives to interest pets like unsweetened pumpkin, mashed sweet potato, steamed carrots, or small bites of white meat turkey.
Keep all bones and trash out of reach and exercise your pet prior to meals or family gatherings to reduce stress and anxiety.
Bugs Never Stop
While some parasites die off in cooler temperatures, ticks are incredibly hardy. Be sure to remove piles of leaf litter, remove stacked wood or fallen branches from the property, cover up the compost bin, and continue your pet’s parasite prevention medication.
Dangerous Poisons
Property owners commonly apply rodenticides this time of year to prevent rodents from entering the house when temperatures cool. If a pet eats a rodent that has consumed poison, they too could face life-threatening conditions.
Pets with high prey drives may find it all too easy and enjoyable to hunt live rodents this time of year. That is, until they come down with symptoms of internal parasites transferred from their prey. Again, most parasite prevention medications can reduce the incidence of worms. Be on the safe side and keep that medication up to date.
Fall Pet Safety
Pets may need more calories to stay warm as the weather cools, but overfeeding can lead to ill health. Invest in warm clothing, self-heating bedding, booties, and regularly exercise your pet as weather allows.
If you are enjoying brisk walks at night or before dawn be sure to be properly outfitted with reflective clothing and accessories. Blinking colors or leashes can help with driver visibility but can also guard against potential predators.
Preparing Pets For Fall
From all of us at Vital Vet Animal Hospital, we wish you and your pet a truly memorable, safe fall. Please call us at info@vitalvetcare.com with any questions or concerns.