I made a website that tells you which human foods are toxic for dogs (isittoxicformydog.com)

Hi Hackernews!

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of IsItToxicForMyDog.com, your one-stop shop to answer the question: “Is this human food toxic for my dog?”

Designed for simplicity, the site features what I believe to be the most extensive database of annotated human foods out there. Type in a food and the site will respond with a clear indicator, “SAFE” or “TOXIC”, that you can use as guidance when giving your dog human food.

Please do not take the information presented on this site as a substitute for medical advice. In an emergency, always call poison control or a veterinarian instead.

I’d love to hear feedback from the community here. Please comment below if there are any bugs, issues, or feature requests that come to mind.

Thank you all!

Sean

No indication of “it's toxic if your dog eats an entire 2lb bag” vs “it's toxic if they eat a 2 gram slice”, no indicator of where to get more information.

Kinda feels like the classic “every symptom means cancer!” issue common to medical databases for laypeople.

And how are there 5 varieties of almond butter listed, but not almonds themselves?

“Almond Milk, Unsweetened: TOXIC”, and yet every site I've looked at says it's fine in small amounts.

Definitely worth adding xylitol. It's used quite a bit in chewing gum and some sugar-free stuff, and is quite toxic to dogs

neat, but tbh there's zero chance i'm going to remember this next time i need to find out if something is toxic for my dog. google knows the answer

Why is “beef and broccoli” toxic but neither “broccoli and cauliflower” nor “beef with potatoes” are?

I’m not a dog owner. I visited the site mainly out of curiosity.

I like that you limited it to only a known set of queries.

How did you vet the set, to be certain that it won't ever say that something is OK when it's toxic?

I love the intention behind this, because this is information I search for regularly, but the build feels lacking a bit at the moment.

The biggest problem is that any site which attempts what you're aiming for would need to offer me more than my current approach, which is just to Google "[food] safe for dogs", which returns me:

A. Multiple sources of information to cross-reference the results, increasing my confidence in the answer. This site only gives me a YES/NO result with no(!) indication of where the information is coming from. You should definitely add a list of sources for the information below the results. For instance, my second search was for blueberries, which all the results on the first page of Google say are safe for dogs, but your website declares TOXIC. Mistakes like that will instantly kill my desire to trust your single source of information.

B. An indication of what level foods might be toxic to dogs at. As other commenters have mentioned, it's not a binary result. A note below the result quoting one or two of what your sources say about levels of toxicity would be really helpful.

Also, just from a usability perspective, when I start typing a food into the search bar and the list of autosuggestions appear, I was expecting to be able to hit the down arrow to start going down the list and hit enter to select the result I want. Making me go back to the mouse to select the answer I want was an (admittedly small) point of frustration).

Couple notes:

1. Google and Amazon smart speakers do a surprisingly good job with these kind of queries and work better as providing a more frictionless means of getting an answer to these types of spur of the moment questions.

2. Claiming to have one of the most extensive databases around food related toxicities for dogs and not immediately providing a link to the sources of your information on your website is a big red flag.

According to this, chicken is toxic for dogs? And "water, bottled, plain"?

Plain bottled water is toxic to dogs?

Also it was not obvious to me that just because it showed the “toxic” message with icon that was the answer. I just thought it was some slow loading logo thing that was slow to load. That is the answer, right?

And what is “baby water”? Or “enhanced diet/regular water”?

The biggest issue with every one of these websites: dogs are amazingly size-diverse. They range from a 4lb chihuahua to a 200+lb mastiff. If humans were similarly diverse, we would run from 60lb dwarfs to 3000+lb giants. Poisons are all about the dose, or at least the dose per mass of dog. A Hersey bar that might kill or at least cause suffering for the chihuahua will likely do absolutely nothing to the mastiff. Dogs are also very diverse in health and constitution, from very sensitive purebreds with allergies and strong reactions, to resilient mutts that shrug off most things. So trying to create a website of what is and isn't deadly to "dogs" in general is very difficult.

Maybe a website about poisons for house cats. They range from perhaps 5 to 20 lbs.

      0.45 kg |    1.   lb | Milly       | Chihuahua
    167.   kg |  368.17 lb | Benedictine | Saint Bernard

      0.68 kg |    1.50 lb | Tinker Toy  | Blue Point Himalayan
     21.23 kg |   46.8  lb | Himmy       | Tabby

      2.13 kg |    4.7  lb | Lucia Zarate
    635.   kg | 1400.   lb | Jon Brower Minnoch

“grape” returns about 40 different serving sizes and formats of grapefruit, and doesn’t list grapes (until you add “s”).

For people that want to quickly grep through the data, it can be found here as json https://www.isittoxicformydog.com/static/allfoods.json

Apparently, me feeding my dog some cooked boneless chicken is poisoning them...

I am sorry but this is terrible and almost outright misinformation.

Show HN:

What is an “alexander” and why is it toxic to dogs?

Anyone know the science behind why grapes are bad for dogs? It was a mystery, last i checked.

There are things that are listed as toxic which are not.

What about cardamom and cinnamon?

I am pretty sure cooked noodles are not toxic for dogs (though they should not have them in large amounts)

Cool website! But I thought the website would tell me which human foods are toxic for dogs. (Like, a list? I'm assuming it's not an enormous number?)

Instead, there's only a search bar, and I have to check every food that exists, manually!

Edit: another comment posted a link to the data, >5000 (variations of) meals

  {
    "id": 2343660,
    "name": "crackers, sandwich, cheese filled (ritz)",
    "is_toxic": 1
  },
  {
    "id": 2343655,
    "name": "crackers, sandwich, peanut butter filled",
    "is_toxic": 1
  },

I can't tell which part of this is actually toxic... possibly an ingredient that isn't named?

OP, did you generate this based on a much shorter list of ingredients which are known to be toxic?

this thread is dramatic evidence there's demand for this product.

that said, I have to echo some of the other folks here: this tool is not useful for determining the risk to my dog.

problems: - items known to be not-toxic are listed as toxic (water?) -items known to be toxic are not weighed higher than non-toxic items in search - items with dosage dependent toxicity don't expose that toxicity (onions are toxic, my dog would need to eat several raw onions to have any toxicity) - items known to be extremely toxic in low dosages (like xylitol) aren't present - the toxic component of dishes aren't listed

I tried searching « chocolate », and I have to select an option in the list (chocolate beverage powder dry mix, chocolate beverage powder light dry mix…)

I want to search just « chocolate »

how would an egg and bacon burrito be considered toxic? Maybe not good for a dog, but toxic?

So "peanuts, dry roasted, unsalted", "peanuts, dry roasted, lightly salted" are toxic, but "peanuts, dry roasted, salted" is fine, sounds good.