Can pets eat grapes, raisins, sultanas and currants?

If this has already been eaten, ring your vet or an animal poison control line now rather than waiting for signs to appear — for several of these the window in which treatment works closes before the animal looks unwell. Do not try to make the animal sick at home: home emetics are dangerous for corrosive and petroleum substances and for an animal already showing signs, and salt-based ones have themselves proved fatal.

By animal

What it actually does

Grapes and their dried forms cause acute kidney injury in dogs, and for decades nobody knew why. In 2021 tartaric acid was identified as the likely agent, which also explains why cream of tartar and tamarind produce similar signs. The response is idiosyncratic rather than dose-dependent: some dogs eat a punnet with no effect, others have gone into renal failure after a handful, and there is no way to tell in advance which dog you have. Dried fruit is more concentrated than fresh, so raisins and sultanas are worse gram for gram.

No reliable dose threshold has been published for this. Anything presenting a specific safe amount is extrapolating.

The bit that is usually got wrong

There is no established safe amount. Advice that a couple of grapes is fine is not supported — reported fatal cases have involved very small quantities.

Body weight decides almost everything here, so what is trivial for a 40 kg dog can matter for a 4 kg one, and a bird is smaller again. Where a real published threshold exists this page gives it; where none does, it says so rather than inventing one.

Fruit