Fall is here, winter is on it’s way and with that comes all of your favorite holidays. The holidays are a particularly risky time of year for our animal friends. To ensure that everyone has a vet- visit free season, it’s important to keep pets away from holiday decor and other seasonal safety risks.
Petiquette 101: Keeping Pets Away From Holiday Decorations
Skip the Sweet Decorations
Tables full of candy corn, chocolates, giant gum “eyeballs” and other sweets are all part of the Halloween tradition. However, they can pose some serious Halloween safety concerns for your pet.
Avoid Spider Web Halloween Decorations
You’ve likely seen the spider web decorations that people attach to light fixtures, doors and even picture frames. Some pets find the webs enticing and try to chew on them.
Forego Decorative Corn and Balloons
While many people hang both high up where they’re generally out of reach of pets, they can still fall, allowing pets to chew and ingest them. Corn cobs are notorious for causing stomach and intestinal blockages for dogs!
Place Pumpkins Out of Reach
Carved pumpkins can pose some serious pet safety issues. Large chucks that aren’t chewed well can become lodged in the intestinal tract, and potentially toxic mold quickly grows in carved pumpkins that aren’t refrigerated.
Keep them up and well out of reach of your pets if they are indoors and even if they are outdoors!
Be Careful With Lighting
Candles in pumpkins and glow sticks that are used as part of holiday light displays can be dangerous, too. Pets smell something new and want to investigate, if they chew open the glow sticks and ingest them they can become quite ill.
The same goes for candles. They can easily be knocked over my a well meaning but excited pet and cause a fire!
Limit Fog and Sound Machines
Although fog and sound machines generally don’t cause injury to pets, the noise and vibration they create can cause undue stress and can be frightening. If you want to make sure your pets enjoy the season as much as you do it is best to keep them to a minimum near pets!
Move the Trash
Move your trash out of the kitchen to an area your pet can’t access. With all the holiday baking and cooking, your trash is probably going to fill up with some pretty tempting scraps.
If you have a pet who loves to paw through the trash, this is a time of year worth taking extra precautions to avoid that.
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