The Pet Poisoning Toolkit - How It Works and Its Limits
This page is not veterinary advice. Paw Multiverse is not a veterinary practice. We cannot examine, diagnose or treat your animal. There are no medicines here, no doses, no home remedies and no treatment steps, on purpose. If your pet is unwell, has swallowed something, or has changed in a way you cannot explain, ring your vet or your nearest emergency clinic and let them decide. Full disclaimer.
This page used to be an announcement. It said some tools had been launched, and then it sat here doing nothing for anybody who arrived later, which is most people. It has been rebuilt into the thing an announcement should have been in the first place: a plain account of how these tools are built, what each one will tell you, and, at greater length, what none of them can tell you.
If your animal has swallowed something right now, do not read this page. Ring your vet or your nearest emergency clinic. This page is for the calm moment, before or after, when you want to know whether an online tool is worth anything and what it is actually doing.
The method, in one section
Every toxicity tool on this site follows the same five rules. They were adopted deliberately, after a review, and several tools were rebuilt from scratch to meet them rather than patched.
- Every threshold is attributed. If a tool reports a quantity, the publisher of that quantity is named on screen, with the date we read it, in the result itself rather than in a footnote at the bottom of the page.
- Nothing is written from memory. If we could not fetch a source, the claim is dropped and the gap is named on the page rather than filled in with something that sounds right.
- The output is never a verdict. A tool reports what published sources say. It does not say what is true of your animal, because it has not examined your animal and has no way to.
- No branch says safe. There is no result on any of these tools that says your pet is fine, low risk, or that no action is needed, including the branches below every published threshold. Those branches say explicitly that this is not a safe level, and why.
- Every branch routes to a vet, including the empty input branch and the invalid input branch. A tool that sits silent when you give it nothing is a tool that has quietly told you not to worry.
Two things were removed to get there, and we would rather say so than let you notice. Urgency bands were removed, because a colour is a verdict wearing a costume. And colour coded results were removed for the same reason. Each affected tool carries a section explaining its own removal rather than doing it quietly.
Why a published threshold is not a home test
This is the central point of the whole toolkit, and it is worth spending a section on because it is where every poisoning search on the internet goes wrong.
A published toxic dose is a research finding about a population. Applying it to one animal at home requires you to know several things you almost certainly do not know: exactly how much was actually swallowed rather than how much is missing from the packet, exactly what the animal weighs today, what else it ate, how long ago, and how this individual animal responds compared with the average.
The people who publish those figures say so themselves. The Cornell Riney Canine Health Center, read 5 August 2026, writes on grape and raisin toxicity that “the exact toxic dose or number of ingested grapes that can cause harm is not entirely known”, that “sensitivity differs between dogs”, and that “any ingestion of grapes or related fruits should be considered serious”. Its instruction to owners is unambiguous: “Don’t wait for symptoms to appear. Call your veterinarian or nearest emergency veterinary hospital immediately.”
what a tool knows, and what a vet knows ------------------------------------------------------ a published threshold a vet in the room --------------------------- ---------------------- a number from a population this animal assumes an exact quantity can ask, and examine assumes an exact weight can weigh it assumes nothing else eaten can take a history assumes an average animal can see this one cannot change its mind can reassess the tool is a reading aid. it is not a test.
The ASPCA runs a poison control service, and the way it describes that service makes the same point from the other direction. Its Animal Poison Control page, read 5 August 2026, tells owners that if they think their pet may have ingested a potentially poisonous substance they should call, and that they will connect with “highly trained veterinary toxicology experts”, drawing an explicit contrast with automated systems. It also notes that “A consultation fee may apply.” We are not going to argue with a poison control centre about the limits of software.
Tool by tool: what each will and will not tell you
There are two kinds of tool here. Some report published thresholds. Some organise information you already have. Neither kind diagnoses anything.
- Poison control directory. Will tell you what published databases record about a named plant, including the toxic principle and reported effects where those are published, with the database’s own disclaimers reproduced in full. Will not tell you whether your animal ate enough to matter, or whether it is affected.
- Grapes and raisins risk checker. Will tell you what the published sources report, including the fact that one major source declines to publish a figure at all. Will not tell you your dog is fine, in any branch.
- Onion and garlic checker. Will report published quantities for onion, and will report that a poison control body declines to publish one for garlic. Will not convert either into a prediction about your animal.
- Xylitol checker. Will report published thresholds and will report what the source says about cats. The cat branch still routes to a vet, because a source saying a species is not at risk from one substance is not the same as your cat being fine.
- Human painkiller checker. Will report the published bands. Will not name brands, and no longer repeats a claim we previously made that overstated what the source actually says.
- Chocolate calculator. Will report what the published sources say about chocolate type and quantity. Will not tell you whether this dog, today, is in trouble.
- Pet poison control directory. The general form of the same thing, with the same rules and the same refusals.
- Poison control directory. Organises what is published into something you can print and put where the food is. Every row is traceable to the source it came from, and the one row we could not attribute to a source of the same standard is flagged as such on the page.
- Emergency triage helper. Helps you organise what you are about to say on the phone. It does not triage your animal. The name is older than the policy and the tool has been rebuilt to match the policy.
- Pet emergency folder and the printable fridge sheet. No thresholds at all. These exist entirely to make sure the right phone call happens quickly.
Deliberately, this page does not repeat a single one of the thresholds. They belong on the page that carries their source and their date, next to the caveats that came with them. Lifting a number out of that context and putting it on a summary page is precisely the failure mode these tools were rebuilt to avoid.
The other two tools that were announced with these
The original announcement bundled the poisoning tools with two others. Both have since been rebuilt on the same principles, and both are worth knowing about for different reasons.
The breed selector is a matching exercise, not a recommendation engine. It cannot know your household, and it is at its most useful as a way of discovering which questions you had not thought about yet.
The food cost tool no longer calculates anything, and the page now explains why. The arithmetic of food cost needs a feeding amount, and a feeding amount for an individual animal is a veterinary decision rather than a web page output. What replaced it is a method for measuring your own real cost from your own packs, which turns out to be more accurate than the calculator ever was.
What we could not source
This section is on every page we rewrite.
- A statement from the ASPCA poison control page listing exactly what information they ask for on a call. We looked for it in order to help you prepare, and the page we read does not set it out.
- The MSD Veterinary Manual general overview of toxicology, which returned a 404 on the address we tried on 5 August 2026. The specific substance pages we use on the individual tools were obtained; the general overview was not.
- Any published evaluation of whether online toxicity checkers change owner behaviour, for better or worse. That is the study we would most like to read and we could not find one.
- Any UK equivalent of a single national animal poison line that is free at the point of use to the public. The services we found are either commercial, veterinary facing, or both, and we would rather say so than imply a service exists.
- Any figure for how many owners delay a call because an online tool appeared reassuring. This is the risk the whole design is built around and we cannot quantify it.
And the refusals. This page publishes no threshold, no dose, no treatment, no procedure, no home remedy and nothing about inducing anything. Some of those figures exist on the individual tool pages, with their sources and their caveats attached, which is the only place we think they belong.
Printable: what to have ready before you need it
Print this or tick it on screen. It contains no first aid, no procedures and no quantities. Every line is preparation, and every one of them is easier now than in the ten minutes after something happens.
Tick each line only when it is actually done, not planned.
Related pages
The tools themselves, and the pages that sit around them.
- All of our tools
- Poison control directory
- Poison control directory
- Grapes and raisins risk checker
- Onion and garlic checker
- Xylitol checker
- Human painkiller checker
- Chocolate toxicity calculator
- Pet poison control directory
- Emergency triage helper
- Pet emergency folder
- Printable emergency fridge sheet
- Before you call the vet
- Finding an emergency vet
- My dog ate something
- My cat ate something
- Breed selector
- Pet food costs
- Our editorial policy
- Our full disclaimer
