"...Another dog is sick after a beach walk, this time north of Mathesons Bay at Leigh.
Tetrodotoxin, found in a number of poisoned dogs at Hauraki Gulf beaches since July, is suspected but tests have not yet been done to confirm the poison because of funding issues. Experts say the latest poisoning is an indication the problem may have spread beyond inner city beaches, with most cases at Narrow Neck Beach on the North Shore.
Warkworth veterinarian Roger Dunn confirms a distressed client brought her dog to the surgery on Labour Day when it began vomiting within about 30 seconds of licking what the owner thought was a decaying jellyfish near Daniels Reef. Dr Dunn says MAF Biosecurity has indicated from the symptoms that tetrodotoxin poisoning was the likely cause.
A number of dog poisonings have been linked to tetrodotoxin or TTX, found in the grey side-gilled sea slug, but suspicions in this case fall on the slug’s jelly egg strand, often attached to rocks or floating freely.
"While the worst effects were starting to wear off, the dog was still shaking and had to be carried into the surgery," Dr Dunn says. "It had been vomiting for some time in the owner’s car.
"We gave the dog an anti-vomiting injection and would have put in a drip and given other treatment if needed."
The woman owner, who doesn’t wish to be identified, told the Rodney Times she was walking with her two dogs over rocks with many rock pools exposed as the tide was out. Aware of the dog poisonings attributed to tetrodotoxin, she says she had been particularly vigilant watching her dogs. What "looked like a decaying jellyfish" was in a crevice. One of the dogs, "Charlie", licked it once while being called away.
Within 30 seconds Charlie started heaving and was vomiting violently and shaking, the owner says.
It took 10 minutes to get the 40kg dog to the car because she was continually vomiting and convulsing. "I’ve never seen such a violent reaction. I’ve had a dog die before from eating poison and this was nothing like that," she says.
"With it being the holidays there was a lot of traffic on the road and I got stuck in traffic. Some people were very kind as they could see I was crying, even so it still took 40 minutes to get to the vets in Warkworth."
Dr Dunn says a smaller dog would have died. "This is a large, strong, young dog and she received a sub-lethal dose of a toxin," he says. "If she had been a small 6kg dog she would have died."
Paul McNabb from the Cawthron Institute in Nelson, the independent trust that has been testing for the poison, says the last confirmed dog death from TTX poisoning was at Tapu Beach in the Coromandel in late September. Vet Elsa Flint from Shore Vets in Devonport, whose clinic dealt with one of the dogs that died and another confirmed poisoning, says there were two confirmed poisonings on Takapuna Beach about a month ago.
Dr Flint says the public needs to be more vigilant about TTX poisoning from sea creatures, instead of focusing on the rat poison brodifacoum. "The symptoms of TTX are completely different from poisoning from the rat poison brodificoum," she says.
"Brodifacoum isn’t fast-acting and doesn’t cause vomiting. Rather it works on the clotting mechanisms in the blood and can take up to three or four days to kill an animal, with the animals dying from internal bleeding. They also have an excessive thirst. There is a totally different presentation."
Dr Dunn agrees. "I have seen many cases of brodifacoum poisoning in my career as a vet and Charlie’s reaction was completely different. She reacted to an acute toxin."
Charlie the dog has since recovered.
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