![[0038] Product Placement](http://www.sandraandwoo.com/comics/2009-03-02-[0038]-product-placement.png "[0038] Product Placement")
The current story arc started with this strip: Squirrel Meat.
While this strip may not be incredibly funny, I like how it can be interpreted in nearly a dozen different ways.
Oh, if you should be working for the marketing department of Kraft Foods, please send us $100 in small bills to our PayPal account at novil@gmx.de. Thank you very much.
- Woo: You have said, Sid and you were friends. And now you’re trying to eat him?! What has come over you?!
- Shadow: I am ashamed of myself, but… I’m so hungry!
- Woo: If that’s all there is to it, then have a look what I’ve brought from home!
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I dunno, I think it’s actually pretty funny. It kinda goes back to the “don’t feed the animals, Bill” comic. Sort of. Ironically? Blegh. Anyways, I think i’d be a funny commercial.
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Woo~! Oreos are awesome~!
~Teddy the Foxcoon =3
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Sorry to say that if I were Shadow, Sid would still be in a spot of trouble; can’t stand Oreos, me.
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Sorry, i don’t understand the funny, this time. Are Oreos specials in your country ?
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Bye, bye, fox.
http://www.dogownersdigest.com/news/library/chocolate-dog-poisoning.shtml
Well…OK. I haven’t a clue if a fox is close enough in relationship to dogs to be susceptible to chocolate poisoning. But, the facts on that page give some very interesting information that might also shine in this situation.
“Once dogs have tasted chocolate, they want more.
And for dogs, that’s a bad thing.”
“Why is Chocolate Lethal?
Chocolate contains theobromine. A naturally occurring stimulant found in the cocoa bean…it’s the theobromine that is poisonous to dogs.”
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Here’s what this web site has to say on the subject.
http://www.foxes.org/urbanfox/feeding.html
“+ Make sure you feed them the right foods. In general, the best things to feed them are things they could find in nature, for example:
+ Raw meat (cooked is okay)
+ Fresh fruit or berries
+ Vegetables
+ Eggs
+ Earthworms (foxes eat earthworms and other insects, sometimes as a large part of their diet)
- Things you should NOT feed them are:
- Chocolate: this tasty treat for humans is poisonous to canids. They can’t digest it. It can make them very sick and even kill them (though if you have been feeding chocolate to foxes, don’t feel guilty. I’ve heard stories of dogs and foxes that could eat chocolate quite happily. But you can’t tell until you feed it to them.).
- Highly processed foods like candy, potato chips, and other snacks
- Dry pet food”
I’m not even 100% sure Woo should be touching Oreos. Let me attempt to check.
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Yes, you are right : Theobromine is poisonous for all littles carnivorous mammals, and a lot others (even birds). And that’s worst for cats, even.
Humans are an exception becauses with have good enzymes against that (we are frugivorous animals, not carnivorous, omnivorous or even vegans).
Look like there is Theobromine in coffee (some say) and thea.
Worst thing : Thobromine add to itself in the body and there is no
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The only thing I could find was Yahoo answers about if a raccoon could eat chocolate. The collective results were that probably do encounter chocolate in trash cans. Nobody was willing to claim a safe or dangerous reply and it degraded to the legality of owning a raccoon and how to turn one into a pet.
So, let’s just say Woo has eaten them without ill effects and doesn’t know the dangers of chocolate based products towards K-9′s/foxes.
I’d probably get similar search results if I asked whether a raccoon could survive eating a Jeep. (Some sort of weird stunt from the past about Humans digesting military Jeeps, one part at a time. (I don’t even want to think about the windshield shards.))
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http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-10370_12150_12223-94996–,00.html
They say here Raccoons are poisoned by Theobromine and Caffeine.
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Looked also for squirrels. Found they are poisoned by caffeine, and rats and bunnies are poisonned by theobromine, but nothing directly between squirrels and chocolates.
But look like squirrels don’t die after “attacking” chocolate in easter.
Stay tuned for the new “Sandra and Sid” webcomic !
It would be dull if all animals in a comic strip had to have all physical traits of their real species. If a sweet has to be a chocolate chip so that the joke works, I will not use another, less fitting, kind of sweet in the future just for the sake of it.
Garfield eats chocolate pudding.
Snoopy eats chocolate chip cookies.
There’s also only around 8% of cacoa in OREO cookies. So I highly doubt if it would be lethal even if Shadow ate the whole package at once.
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Well, sorry to have bothered you.
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It’s sad how much things can be different in RL compared to how you want’em in your universe, “Novil”. I’m enjoying this so far. In the last panel, I keep imagining Sid holding that box with the shadow hitting his other shoulder to make the shadow look like he’s wearing a sash to imply he’s a scout. And then you could avoid nasty lawyers by having the product being Squirrel Scout Cookies!
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Egad, a huge discussion on the fate of canids with chocolate… Understandable… But toon physics in play, so issue resolved (anybody ever meet a talking raccoon?)
In an anthro RP I did, I played up the chocolate thing, and had cocoa be an addictive / intoxicant substance to the canid I played, it was fun bellying up to the bar and asking for a shot of chocolate milk! =^^=
Cool work and neat resolution! =^^=
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It takes a large dose for chocolate to be lethal in canines, and oreos are mostly going to be some form of flour and sugar. The amount of actual coco in them is likely quite small.
Foxes I’m not sure about since they’re canids but of the vulpine not lupus order of canids.
And if you really needed to write it off, they could be vanilla or strawberry flavor.
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I agree with Tbolt. There is quite the potential (unexpected, I suspect) in having a running gag where the fox gets the first bite of Oreo and suddenly gains an addiction. Oh, the potential fun of this smart fox trying to get his next Oreo bite…or trying to (hopelessly) kick the addictive habbit.
We’re far too young in the series to start offing main characters.
Kind of reminds me of a character I tried to off in a series of RP’s. I made her a harmless prop and the “universe” came back at me and turned her into a main character. Now, she’s unstopable, suave, intelligent and more character then I can handle. She almost steals the whole show.
Never know what unexpectant thing might throw a curve ball into your plans…for better or worse.
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Richard T. Matheson acknowledges in “Mynarski Forest” that chocolate is dangerous to canids, but he got his coyote character addicted to them in spite of initial negative symptoms (rather like most drugs). Matheson had calculated that proportionately, the amount of chocolate it takes to kill a dog was like himself eating 15 pounds of it — probably also deadly.
So go right ahead, Novil. And you know, Oreo may be a good harmony snack, what with the joining of black and white.
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Tom-with what you mentioned, I could see this playing out like that Sinefeld episode.
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Yay, oreos!
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I’ve started reading woo in a German accent and now I can’t stop
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naaah!
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Britbloke: How did that come about? XD
But Woo is a native American, so to speak… A German accent would make more sense for Sid.
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It just happened. I didn’t go “Woo need to be Barvarian!”, it just happened and now I can’t shake it
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I assume chocolate would also be hazardous for ferrets. Something to keep in mind in Second Life.
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There are “Golden Oreos”, which are the non-chocolate type.
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Now on the other hand, protein has some great calories for our fox here, but sugar has even more, fun potential on dealing with a fox with his first sugar buzz! =^^=
(and the ton of calories should help him build up a nice layer of fat, hopefully not too much if he goes hog wild! =^^; )
So many fun possibilities gentlemen, keep up the good work!
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haha, great, now I’m going to be hearing Woo talk in a stereotypical german accent as well
(though i’ve told my brain to knock it off and soften it to a more realistic one).
Shadow is for some reason Stephen Fry, and Sid is Chandler from Friends.
hehehe…
Also: Googles for “can dogs eat oreos” —-
A 20lb dog would need to eat approx 10 oz / 300g of candybar type chocolate to become ill – not dead (needs higher dose).
(Elsewhere: “1 oz milk chocolate for every 1lb of dog; 1oz semisweet / 3lb; 1oz baking chocolate / 9lb”)
Chocolate is the very last entry in an Oreos ingredient list*, and apparently either has the Theobromine removed (they maybe realise it’s a bad idea to leave it in something that could be mistaken for a dog-biscuit by a child or an inquisitive hound), or is such a small amount that it legally counts either as “trace” or “none”.
“My dog ate a 5lb bag of M&Ms and had diahorrea for a couple of days, but survived”…
(* confirmed for myself on their website while looking for further info… not forthcoming)
I wonder how much Oreo is equal to 10 oz of chocolate? I’d say easily a 1:10 ratio given everything that’s in them. So even for bakers chocolate it’d be >1 oz / lb weight toxicity level. It’s likely a lot lower.
*further research: ok, maybe i’m wrong on that one, in different directions. Milk chocolate is about “50mg/oz” (yay mixed metric/imperial units! gahhh), baking chocolate up to 400mg/oz (figures). Oreos, 15mg per cookie (how many cookies in an 18oz pack??). So a lot more than you’d expect from looking at an oreo vs a candybar. Even though the ingredient proportion is very low, it’s a very concentrated ingredient. Also, there is 2.4mg of caffiene per cookie; about 6mg/oz in milk chocolate, and a very, very variable amount (8-120) in baking choc.
In fact, how much of an effort towards gluttony a human would have to put in to eat 300g of bittersweet flavoured, icing-filled biscuits in one go anyway?
How heavy might Shadow be?
And presumably they shared the biscuits (in, presumably, a typical 18oz packet – 6oz each … though if Sid’s holding it like that, maybe it’s smaller) between the three of them…
Heck, as they’re a cheap mass produced product they may even have “dog chocolate” in anyway… the cheap stuff that’s largely not cocoa anyway but is mostly made with other ingredients aping it. (And from the state of american candy when I’ve sampled it, probably goes into/onto a lot of their sweets… lots of sugar and plastickyness, not much chocolate flavour or decent texture!)
And of course, though I didn’t realise it myself… the Choc Oreos are a *variation* on the original ones, which are the “golden”, more custard-creme type cookie. So that’s an easy narriative dodge opened up right there. And I bet any canid or rodent would yum those super sweet ones right up even more than the chocolate ones, which are just a little too bitter for my liking.
Further research:
Dogs are actually only slightly less resistant to Theobromine than humans, weight for weight – but of course, they weigh much less, and it apparently has a much longer half-life in their body (18h vs about 6h). Minimum Lethal Dose for humans, 115mg/kg (52mg/lb); for dogs, 100mg/kg (45mg/lb). LD50 (ie the dose that kills half of the test subjects) for humans is, of course, not listed, but someone somewhere has gone to the extreme of feeding their lab dogs til half of them die — this happens at “BETWEEN 250 and 500mg/kg”, or to split the difference, approx 170mg/lb.
So if there’s 15mg of theobromine in each oreo, it’s probably not smart to let a canine eat more than three cookies for each pound of bodymass. REALLY bad idea to let them scarf more than ten per pound. To avoid illness (assuming the relationship between min. lethal dose and min. toxic dose is similar as it is for humans (where it’s subbed in for the LD50), ie about a 1:4-1:5 relationship, they could eat maybe one cookie per pound of mass and only feel a little unwell, or maybe suffer no ill effect at all.
For the record, cats have a theo LD50 of 200mg/kg. And for caffiene, min lethal dose: Cats 100-150mg/kg, dogs 140-150, humans 150-200. So be careful popping those truckers pep pills now. And certainly don’t leave them near your pets (they’re about 100mg per pill i think. and often sugared). *goes off to check own weight, and carefully check the caffiene content listed on the next can of red bull*
Caffeine halflife: human 3 TO 60!! hours (!) (or 1.5 to 6 DAYS for infants – don’t let them near the stuff), canine 4.5h.
The list i’m looking at also has stats for some other thing called Theophylline, but I don’t know what that is and it doesn’t give any stats for its food content.
Quoting from said list, BTW:
“Most of the numeric data comes from Clinical Veterinary Toxicology, edited by Konnie Plumlee, DVM, DABVT, DACVIM, published by Mosby, 2003.
While the following statement was not used in the above calculator and data, the information seems pertinent and was provided by Susan Barrett, DVM via a communication on VIN. “Based on ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center (APCC) experience, mild signs occur in animals ingesting 20 mg/kg of theobromine and caffeine, severe signs are seen at 40-50 mg/kg, and seizures occur at 60 mg/kg (ASPCA/APCC Database: Unpublished data). Accordingly, less than 1 oz of milk chocolate/lb (2 oz/kg) is potentially lethal to dogs; for baking (unsweetened) chocolate, less than 0.1 oz/lb (0.2 ounces/kg) is potentially lethal. Methylxanthines can cross the placenta and pass into the milk, so unborn or nursing offspring can be affected by chocolate toxicosis in the dam.” ”
Yikes. Though note that IS still per-kilo / -pound, not overall.
Another resource: http://www.phouka.com/dogs/dog_choc.html
Yay research vs folk-knowledge musings
Finally…
http://images.google.com/images?q=dark+side+cookies
lol, couldn’t find the one i wanted (someones explodingdog/nataliedee-style avatar), but knock yourself out with those
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Wow. That’s the danger of having such a teeny tiny slit of a comments edit box, there. I had no idea I’d written / copied-in so much stuff :-/
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I like how the one site gave a quick mention to their dog scarfing down the chocolate with no effect, what so ever.
And…a sugar rush on one that never had it…ON an empty stomache. Erm…Hammy on an energy drink moment???
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Woot, at least, i have learned something : Some webcomics authors take not-applause comment sin a way i’m happy you can’t kill by Internet…
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Gosh, I just look at the words
I’m ashamed!
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I only said that I like oreo´s cookies…
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I’m pretty sure the whole Oreo thing was supposed to be a joke. I can’t believe how hard some people work to make a 4-panel comic strip unfunny.
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3-panel, my bad.
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BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!XD
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First comment woo!
And…that last panel reminds me more of a Mentos advertisement.
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Arashi no Yoru ni… One Stormy Night… watch it.
The touching tale of the friendship of a goat and the wolf who wants to eat him.
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Why does it seem most of this guys comics end up being a big thing where you guys write HUGE comments with countless research then top it off with a chat bubble error and another minor detail you noticed?
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Perhaps it is polyunsaturated, but is it high in omega 3, or specifically DHA that we get from fish?