Can pets eat lilies?

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

True lilies — Lilium and Hemerocallis, which includes Easter, tiger, stargazer and day lilies — cause acute kidney failure in cats and the toxic principle is still not identified. The dose required is tiny: a cat that brushes past the flower and grooms pollen off its coat, or drinks vase water, has had an exposure. It is not a food and it is here because it is the single most common lethal poisoning of household cats, and because cut flowers arrive in homes as gifts from people who do not know.

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

The bit that is usually got wrong

Peace lilies, calla lilies and lily of the valley are not true lilies and cause different problems. The Lilium and Hemerocallis ones are the kidney-failure risk, and no cat household should have them.

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.

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