Slug pellets nearly killed her Airedale terrier, so what damage can they do to a child or to the environment, asks Sarah Marriott.
Bess collapsed on the floor after coming in from playing in the garden. Her legs were shaking, her body was wracked with strong tremors and she was panting. Suddenly, her body went into spasm; her back arched and her legs went rigid. I bundled her up in the car and rushed her to the local clinic. There she got an anaesthetic to stop the spasms and give her heart a rest, but it looked like she might not live through the night.
The next day, after finding a chewed container of slug pellets on the grass, I took my 11-month-old Airedale terrier to the Animal Hospital in Castlebar.
"I've never seen a dog survive this," said the vet. The treatment was valium for seizures, a saline drip for dehydration and charcoal and Fuller's Earth to prevent further absorption of the poison. The dedicated vet monitored her closely all night - at 9.30 p.m. she was haemorrhaging badly but by midnight it seemed she had turned a corner .
"There could be brain damage and some blindness - and she could still have liver or kidney failure," warned the nurse.
But three weeks later, the medical miracle was back to her usual mischievous self - the scars are all mine. I'll always feel guilty - and immensely grateful to the Castlebar Animal Hospital - because I put an old, unused container of slug pellets on a high shelf ready to be disposed of safely, but unfortunately not high enough for an inquisitive puppy.
If slug pellets can do this much damage to a 21-kilogram dog - the same size as a three-year-old child - what could they do to a person or to our soil and crops?
"Human ingestion is not a big problem," says Dr Joseph Tracey of the National Poisons Information Centre at Beaumont Hospital. He says that slug pellets are of low toxicity, and that the 20 or so cases a year which occur in the Republic rarely need any treatment. However, the Irish Doctors Environmental Association (IDEA) feels that more research on such pesticides is needed.
"Ireland is importing about 60 per cent more pesticides than 10 years ago but no-one is monitoring levels in the human tissue or their long-term effects," says an IDEA spokeswoman. "They may be implicated in diseases; nobody knows. We are concerned at the amount of pesticides being used on vegetables but have been unsuccessful in getting funding for research on their effects."
Originally, metaldehyde was used as a solid fuel, called meta-tablets. Its slug-killing properties were discovered by French farmers who noticed dead slugs and snails in picnic areas where meta- tablets had been left. The active ingredient of slug pellets is 3 to 6 per cent metaldehyde; the rest is usually a cereal-based product similar to dog food.
The World Health Organisation classifies metaldehyde as a class II "moderately hazardous" pesticide, while the Pesticide Action Network UK says it is "highly toxic by inhalation, moderately toxic by ingestion and slightly toxic by dermal absorption".
The severity of symptoms and the eventual outcome depend on the amount of the chemical ingested. Inchem, the international chemical research agency, details the death of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who lived 33 hours after ingesting a five-gramme tablet of metaldehyde. About three hours after taking the chemical, the child was retching and had abdominal pain, which was followed by convulsions. Three hours later, he lost consciousness and after another two hours, he was in a state of constant convulsion.
In another US case, a 16-year-old boy who mistook a metaldehyde tablet for candy had six episodes of convulsions within a 14-hour period. Although he recovered, he had no memory at all of the illness and his general memory was poor for three months after the poisoning. Metaldehyde can kill adults too - and there are reports of it being used as a method of suicide and murder.
Although slug pellets are poisonous, household bleach is labelled more clearly. The small print on pellet containers says "can kill pets" and "keep away from pets and children both in storage and in use". But renaming slug pellets as "slug poison" and marking containers with a skull-and-crossbones would help to alert children, parents and pet owners to the lethal nature of the product - and might make gardeners think twice about contaminating their soil with it.
Another problem is the lids of the pellet containers. They tend to be of the squeeze-and-twist type, which my dog opened and which many children would be able to manage too. According to Dr Tracey of the Poisons Information Centre: "There is really no childproof top; children will get it open eventually. The idea is to slow them down so the parent can intervene in time."
Although the bright blue pellets are a similar colour to some Smarties and may be attractive to young children, Tracey adds: "Blue is felt to be the least appetising colour, rarely seen in glossy photos in cookbooks."
So who decides which pesticides are safe enough to be freely available? Pesticides are authorised by the EU, says the Pesticides Control Service at Abbotstown. Although many garden pesticides have recently been taken off the shelves, slug pellets are not among them. Metaldehyde is on a list of active substances which are due to be reviewed in a process which begins this November and could take up to three years.
Accurate figures for animals affected by slug pellets are hard to come by. While no agency in the Republic compiles figures, the London-based Veterinary Poisons Information Service had reports of 136 slug-pellet poisonings of domestic animals in 2000 and Guide Dogs for the Blind reported that one of its dogs (which cost £30,000 to train) was poisoned by pellets.
The Wildlife Incident Information Scheme (WIIS) in the UK says that 20 animals were poisoned by slug pellets in 2000. However, it admits the numbers could be higher: "Wild animals such as badgers and foxes, which are likely to find the pellets palatable, are equally at risk in such circumstances. Unfortunately, the fact that they are likely to skulk for cover once affected will mean that they are less likely to be found and reported to the scheme."
There is also the possibility that slug predators such as hedgehogs and birds eat poisoned slugs. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is concerned that slug pellets may be responsible for the decline in Britain's bird population.
Slugs may devastate a garden, but after seeing the agony that slug pellets caused my puppy - and could cause to children and wildlife - it seems that the risks are too high a price to pay for perfect hostas and cabbages.