An unlucky Chihuahua got absolutely blitzed on cocaine and lived to tell the tale through a veterinary case study spotted by Ars Technica. According to a recent case study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, the tiny dog managed to ingest nearly 96 milligrams of cocaine. And maybe a little fentanyl as a chaser. The poor thing is already shaky enough as it is.
The two-year-old Chihuahua was found by its owners looking like it was on the verge of death—tongue out, glassy-eyed, and unresponsive. Vets noted a dangerously slow heart rate, dilated pupils, and signs of poor oxygenation.
This was much more than your average sick dog, with all the hallmarks of a poisoning, just not your usual “my dog ate a whole Hershey’s bar” kind of sick.
This Chihuahua Downed a Bunch of Cocaine and Somehow Survived
A hefty dose of atropine and epinephrine got the little guy stable enough to transfer to a teaching hospital, where lab tests confirmed the drug cocktail in his system. How a Chihuahua wound up with Tony Montana-at-the-end-of-Scarface-levels of cocaine in his system is still a mystery.
The owners say the dog did have a history of eating anything and everything in its path, but they also say they had no drugs at home.
Hm. Okay. Sure.
So far, this is just a story of a dog that barely survived a cocaine binge. What’s truly weird, and scientifically interesting, about it is that cocaine usually speeds up the heart, not down. The vets couldn’t wrap their heads around it.
“The net cardiovascular effect of cocaine in canines remains complex,” say the authors of the paper. While Ars Technica points out that studies have examined the effects of cocaine on the cardiovascular system, in both humans and animals, the conditions of those studies might be so controlled that they might offer different results than real-life case reports like this one.
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