[dragontamer]

When my dog was poisoned with rat poison, it didn't die. It just felt really miserable for several days.

Poison doesn't mean "death", it also includes multiple days of misery. Of course some poisons can kill you, but others are just miserable (but survivable).

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Typical Rat poison in the USA is also treatable with Vitamin K1 pills, lowering the misery the dog feels.

[jjk166]

Rat poison can most certainly kill a dog, and at lower doses still cause severe symptoms like seizures and paralysis. For many dogs even just a few milligrams of rat poison can be fatal.

[dragontamer]

Rat poison _can_ kill a dog, but it certainly isn't designed to.

https://www.merckvetmanual.com/toxicology/rodenticide-poison...

Bromethalin is chosen as a rat poison (rather than other poisons) because you have a chance to save your dog (or your neighbor's dog) if it eats the poison. Its slow enough moving that it won't instantly kill your pets.

In either case, the dog won't have a pleasant time at all. It'd be "poisoned", seizures and paralysis of course, or limp hind legs, etc. etc.

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My overall point is that even "poisonous poisons", like rat poison (bromethalin) isn't a death sentence. Ideally, you want to get the dog treated ASAP, but if it were in a low-enough dosage, it could be a week (!!) before the dog shows symptoms.

Or you know, it could be 4 hours. Hard to say.

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Cannabis is clearly a "lesser poison", even compared to rat poison / bromethalin (which itself is lesser than cyanide). I think children who are going to the emergency room to be diagnosed with poisoning (even if they aren't at risk of "death"), is certainly a "poisoning event". Just not a poison with deadly risk.

[jjk166]

Well yeah, it's rat poison. If it was intended to kill dogs, they'ed call it dog poison.

That a poison has some minimum dosage or can potentially be prevented from causing harm with proper intervention is irrelevant. The same could be said for cyanide. The fact is that there is some dosage that can cause serious harm without proper intervention.

My point is that rat poison is a serious risk to dogs. Technically anything that chemically causes undesired side effects is a poison, but colloquially we tend to distinguish between things that are dangerous and things that are merely unpleasant. Rat poison is firmly in the first category, cannabis is in the second.