“So we’re going off the assumption that it’s marijuana. It’s very possible that it could be something else, but unless the symptoms are vastly different, generally speaking, they’re fine after a few hours.”

In September, Dr. Ian Sandler, a member of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association’s national issues committee and the CEO of Toronto’s Grey Wolf Animal Health, told the Toronto Star that veterinarian clinics across the country were seeing significant increases in the number of dogs being brought in stoned on pot products.

“We are absolutely seeing an increase,” Sandler told the Star.

“And this is all over Canada,”

He said anecdotal tales from many Canadian vets have pointed to a large increase in the number of dogs being treated for cannabis emergencies.

But he also pointed to a report released in August 2019 by a Minnesota-based pet poison help line that showed a significant uptick in the number of Canadian owners calling in for advice with pot-related emergencies — 90 per cent of which involved stoned dogs.

Only 64 Canadian cases were recorded by the centre in all of 2018 while 54 were reported in the first seven months of 2019 alone.

Treatment

Forbes said that, for a dog that comes in after possibly eating cannabis, she will check a few things first and then monitor them for a few hours before sending them home.

“Their metabolisms are so much faster than people’s, so they’re going to burn it off a lot quicker,” she said.

“As long as I can keep their heart rate stable, their hydration status is good, they’re not vomiting, I’m not worried about aspiration pneumonia and they’re not running a fever, I’m perfectly happy to just monitor them and maintain that.”

For people taking their dogs for walks on that trail, or anywhere else for the city for that matter, Forbes advises owners to keep an eye on their pets to make sure they don’t eat something they shouldn’t.

“My dogs are off-leash dogs, and we go on trails all the time, but you always want a visual cue of where the dogs are so if they seem particularly interested in an area, so you can see if it’s something dead that they’re smelling or if it looks like something that’s been tampered with,” she said.

For those who have dogs with a habit of gulping things down quickly, Forbes recommends having them wear a basket muzzle when out on walks.

“They’re not restrictive, they can still drink, they can bark and be normal dogs, but it prevents them from actually ingesting anything” she said.