Walking your dog on the beach should be an enjoyable, relaxing experience, but if you ever chance upon a boulder-sized white blob that looks something like this, please be cautious! This substance may seem harmless, but if eaten, it can kill dogs.
One day, a woman in England was walking her dog on the beach when she stumbled upon a strange, waxy, white blob. Her dog, attracted by the substance’s distinctive smell, ran up to inspect it.
Initially, the woman thought it was a jellyfish, but on closer examination, it clearly was not. Puzzled by the mysterious substance, she quickly pulled her dog away from it.
The rock-sized white blob, resembling candle wax, turned out to be a lump of congealed palm oil, also known as a “fatberg.”
The solidified balls are believed to have drifted thousands of miles from the Caribbean, across the Atlantic Ocean, and washed ashore on beaches across the United Kingdom following the chaos of Storm Angus in November 2016.
Fatbergs, covered in deadly germs, are in fact poisonous particularly to dogs, who love sniffing the substance because it emits a “diesel-like” smell.
“These things can cause two-fold problems, the first is gastro, the second is foreign body obstructions,” said TV vet Marc Abraham. “As the palm oil is so gelatinous it can get lodged in the esophagus and require emergency surgery.
“If you think your dog has swallowed something it shouldn’t, contact your vet immediately,” he cautioned.
“We looked online and were worried that we could lose him after seeing what had happened to other dogs, so my husband rushed him to the vets straight away,” de Fraine said.
