🌰Acorns and oak leaves
Under every oak from September. Some dogs develop a genuine acorn habit, and repeated snacking is worse than one stolen mouthful.
Signs: Vomiting, diarrhoea (sometimes bloody), stomach pain, lethargy; large or repeated intakes can affect kidneys and liver.
🚑 What to do: Call your vet if your dog has eaten acorns - and mention it clearly if it happens often, because the risk stacks.
🛡 Prevention: Know your route's oaks, and swap the acorn hoover for a treat pouch and a solid 'leave it' during the dropping weeks.
🌰Conkers (horse chestnuts and buckeyes)
Shiny, croquet-ball tempting, and wrong in two ways at once: the aescin in them poisons, and the whole nut blocks intestines.
Signs: Drooling, vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pain; with a swallowed whole conker, blockage signs - repeated vomiting, no appetite, straining - can follow days later.
🚑 What to do: Call your vet if a conker was chewed or swallowed. A swallowed whole one deserves a clinic visit even before symptoms.
🛡 Prevention: Same tools as acorns: route awareness, 'leave it', and a ball in your pocket that beats anything on the ground.
🍎Fallen and fermenting fruit
Orchard corners and fruit-tree lawns. Windfalls ferment where they lie, carry wasps inside, and plums and other stone fruit add pits that block and break teeth.
Signs: Wobbliness or unusual drowsiness after grazing (fermented fruit means alcohol), mouth pain from a hidden wasp, vomiting or blockage signs from swallowed stones.
🚑 What to do: A wobbly dog after an orchard raid deserves a vet call - alcohol affects dogs at small doses, and 'sleeping it off' is not a plan.
🛡 Prevention: Rake windfalls before the dog goes out, and fence the compost where the rotten ones end up.
🍄Wild mushrooms
Lawns, verges and woodland floors after wet weeks. Most are harmless; the exceptions can destroy a liver, and nobody can tell them apart at a glance.
Signs: Anything from drooling and vomiting to wobbliness, seizures - or a deceptive quiet day followed by serious illness.
🚑 What to do: Treat every unknown-mushroom snack as an emergency: go now, and bring a photo or a sample of the mushroom in a paper bag - identification changes the whole treatment.
🛡 Prevention: Clear fungi from your own lawn weekly in season, and keep known scavengers on a lead through fungus-rich woods.
🎃Halloween
A bowl of chocolate by the door, xylitol sweets in trick-or-treat hauls, foil wrappers that go down with the prize, and glow sticks that cats bite through.
Signs: Chocolate and xylitol as in any season - vomiting, racing heart, or weakness and collapse. Glow-stick liquid tastes foul and causes dramatic drooling and foaming in cats, but is usually low-toxicity.
🚑 What to do: Wrappers en masse can block - call your vet with the evidence you have. For the drooling glow-stick cat, offer water and food to rinse the taste, and call if anything beyond drool develops.
🛡 Prevention: The sweet bowl lives on a high shelf between rings of the doorbell, and children's haul gets counted and stored, not left on the floor.
🎆Fireworks season
The loudest week of the year is also the year's peak for lost pets: panicked animals go through fences, windows and open doors. The spent tubes and casings are chewable hazards too.
Signs: Trembling, hiding, pacing, destructive escape attempts; a pet that bolted and came back exhausted or limping deserves a check.
🚑 What to do: For severe noise fear, talk to your vet weeks ahead - real help exists and works better planned than improvised on the night. A pet that ate firework debris needs a vet call: the metals inside are not benign.
🛡 Prevention: Walk before dark, secure the garden, close curtains and add background sound, and make sure microchip details are current before the season starts.
☠️Cold-season chemicals return
The first frost brings the antifreeze top-up, and the first cold nights send rodents - and rodent bait - indoors. Autumn is when both reappear after months away.
Signs: Antifreeze: 'drunk' wobbling, vomiting, heavy thirst, then false recovery. Baits: often days of nothing, then bruising, bleeding, weakness or seizures.
🚑 What to do: Both are go-now poisons where treatment works best before symptoms. Call the clinic at the first suspicion, with the product or bait name.
🛡 Prevention: Sealed containers, wiped spills, pet-proof bait boxes or snap traps instead of loose bait - and a word with the neighbours about what they put down.
🗑️Compost, bins and mouldy food
Damp autumn compost and raided bins. Mouldy bread, nuts and dairy can carry tremorgenic mycotoxins - fast-acting neurological poisons.
Signs: Fine muscle tremors that spread and worsen, restlessness, wobbling, then seizures - often within hours of the raid.
🚑 What to do: Tremors after a bin or compost raid are an emergency. Go immediately; treated promptly, most dogs do well.
🛡 Prevention: Latched bins, fenced or sealed compost, and mouldy leftovers into the outside bin directly - never the food bowl 'because it is only a bit of mould'.
This checklist is general awareness information drawn from widely accepted veterinary and poison-control guidance. It is not a diagnosis, a treatment plan or a substitute for professional care, and risks vary with your individual pet, dose and region. In any suspected poisoning or emergency, your first move is to contact a vet or an animal poison line - not to search further.