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Certain compounds found in onions can cause toxicity or poisoning in dogs. When consumed, these toxic compounds are absorbed into the bloodstream and cause your dog’s red blood cells to break down—a process known as hemolysis—which can result in a condition called hemolytic anemia. Hemolytic anemia occurs when red blood cells are destroyed faster than your dog’s body can produce new ones, resulting in a low red blood cell count. Red blood cells are essential because they carry oxygen in the bloodstream. When this process is compromised, your dog may show symptoms such as weakness, lethargy, an elevated heart rate, or even collapse.,Jump to section Why Are Onions Unsafe for Dogs? How Much and What Kind of Onions Are Bad for Dogs? What Will Happen to My Dog If They Eat Onions? Uh, Oh—My Dog Ate Onions, What Do I Do? How Do I Prevent My Dog From Eating Onions? FAQs About Onions and Dogs

Image via Belish/Shutterstock By Victoria Schade It takes more than a patch and vest to make a service dog. Although it’s easy to assume that service dogs, emotional support animals and therapy dogs all provide the same type of aid for their caretakers, their training, responsibilities and access to public spaces differ greatly. The confusion over what working assistance dogs do versus what “support pets” provide can have far-reaching consequences for the people who rely on the tasks their service dogs perform every day. Here’s a breakdown of what each of these categories mean. What Is a Service Dog? According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, “Service animals are defined as dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities.” Veronica Sanchez, a certified professional dog trainer and the owner of Cooperative Paws, an organization that offers service dog training for professional trainers, says, “In the service dog world, we refer to this as ‘task training.’” These tasks are essential functions that handlers are unable to perform on their own because of their impairment. Service dog responsibilities depend on the needs of the handler. Certified professional trainer Michaela Greif from Paws & Affection, a nonprofit organization that trains service dogs for children with a range of disabilities, says that some of the of skills include retrieving dropped items, pulling doors open, turning lights on, pushing drawers and cabinets closed, bracing to provide balance for an owner, interrupting panic attacks or alerting an owner to a change in insulin levels. But the breadth of a service dog’s abilities goes well beyond the day-to-day support they provide their handlers. “The harder work is in creating a dog that can flourish under all types of circumstances, because a service dog needs to be quiet, attentive to the handler, accepting of a multitude of environments and unfazed by every imaginable situation,” Greif says. Training Service Dogs Training a service dog takes commitment. For example, Paws & Affection dogs go through over two years of training, starting at just eight weeks of age. The training starts off with basic pet dog manners, and builds to include thorough socialization, impulse control and the specialized skills needed to support their handler. The formal training process culminates with the Canine Good Citizen Test and Public Access test, which Greif says evaluates the ability of the dog to be an appropriate, unobtrusive helpmate in public. Then, dog and handler are matched and train together to become a working team. The scope of work that goes into preparing a service dog for the responsibility of assisting their handler and acting appropriately in public goes well beyond what typically happens in pet dog training. People with disabilities have the legal right to take their service dog to any place where the general public is allowed, from movie theaters to hospitals, even if pets are not usually permitted there.  How Should You React to Service Dogs in Public? Although it’s tempting to reach out to pet a service dog, it’s critical to resist the urge. Remember, service dogs in public are on the job. Greif cautions, “It is wonderful that so many people are enthusiastic about seeing such dogs in public, and it is most appropriate to direct your interest toward the human on the other end of the leash, rather than assuming it is okay to pet or speak to a service dog.”