Kevin tells us he found meat stuffed with rat poison on the trails at Carkeek Park on Saturday. The piece of meat he found was on the Clay Pit Trail, on the south side of Pipers Creek. He said it appears someone was trying to poison dogs.
The piece of meat was about 3″ long and maybe 1.5″ thick – too big I think to be intended for crows or anything small. The right size, however, for a dog to scarf down before its owner can stop them, on-leash or off. We did not find any more poison anywhere else, but we didn’t check every trail or grassy area.
We warned several folks we saw with dogs, and one family immediately headed off to the vet because their dog had eaten something they thought looked like a strip of meat before they could stop her.
One early sign of rat poison ingestion in dogs is green poop (from the dye in the poison) – if you see that get to the vet immediately. Much more info on symptoms can be easily found online, but short version is that it can take days for symptoms to appear, it does not cause vomiting, and it attacks the blood, causing lethargy and impairing clotting, so often there will be copious bleeding from the mouth and nose or from small injuries.
And here’s what the underside looked like.
KOMO has a story about someone else who found tainted meat at Carkeek this weekend.