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When Ian Reid left an open chip bag on his TV stand, he didn’t expect to return home to find his beloved dog Mingus dead, with the bag almost vacuum-sealed to his muzzle.
The dog was found behind a chair with the chip bag up over his neck, tightly clinging to his face.
“He was motionless and cold,” Reid said.
The incident was devastating to the retired surgeon in Indian Harbour, N.S., and left him with profound feelings of guilt.
When Reid took Mingus to his regular veterinarian clinic to be cremated, the vets were shocked at how the dog died.
“None of the vets were aware of the lethal hazard that the bags present,” he said.
Reid says residual food left in the chip bag was enough of an enticement for the dog to put his nose deep in the bag. By the time a dog has breathed in all the oxygen, they can’t get the bag off their head.
Reid wants other dog owners to be aware of the risk of food packaging.
“These [deaths] are preventable. And it’s tragic and it’s sudden and dramatic and a terrible thing as a pet owner and terrible thing for a pet to go through it,” he said.
Bonnie Harlan experienced something very similar just before Christmas in 2011.
Harlan came home to find her rescue dog, Blue, dead with food packaging suctioned around his face. It was so tight, she couldn’t pull it off on her own.
She then called her vet, who explained how to do dog CPR before he rushed over to her home, but it was too late.
“It only takes three to five minutes, so you don’t have a lot of time when that happens.”
This prompted her to found the non-profit, Prevent Pet Suffocation. In the years since Blue’s death, she’s found many vets still don’t know about the risk of food packaging.
Harlan lives in Texas but says she receives thousands of messages from people around the world every year.
“That’s the thing. This is international. There’s food bags everywhere.”
Maggie Brown-Bury is a small animal veterinarian who works in Newfoundland and Labrador and sits on the executive council of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association.
She said she hasn’t experienced any pet deaths in connection to chip bags, but she said if you search for chip bags in the association’s online network, you do get quite a few hits.
“It is one of the sort of more common accidental tragedies we will see.”
Although chip bag risk isn’t directly addressed in vet schools, Brown-Bury says it is talked about in a more broad way.
“The issue of chip bags of course is the suffocation and lack of oxygen and that is something we touch on specifically, just not necessarily going through all the potential ways it could happen.”
Her sentiments were echoed by Marti Hopson, a veterinarian and lecturer at the Atlantic Veterinarian College on P.E.I.
Hopson says at vet colleges, future vets learn how to talk to their clients about hazards in general and tell clients that living with a pet is like living with a toddler: Anything you see in your environment could be a risk to them.
“I think that the way to do that might be through public campaigns like the Preventing Pets from Suffocation campaign that’s happening on social media and that does take a long time to spread.”
Goal to raise awareness
On Harlan’s website, she lists ways people can protect pets from this kind of harm. One of them is to cut the food packaging up so there are no closed pieces that could become sealed around an animals face.
Reid and Harlan have reached out to organizations like Frito Lay, to ask if they would put a warning on their chip bags.
CBC News reached out to Frito Lay, but they did not respond to the request for comment.
Reid hopes his story can prevent other pet owners from going through what he did.
“I think that the key thing is prevention and knowledge and if this information can be made available through veterinarians, through word of mouth, through general pet owner knowledge and through warnings on these bags, that will go a long way to prevent the hundreds of dogs in particular that suffocate every year.”