Theobromine/chocolate poisoning in a human-bird hybrid character

[bluerosekatie]

Hello!

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who added details, this is the result! (Locked to AO3 users to avoid AI scraping)

I have been looking into chocolate toxicity as it occurs in birds, since I want to write a scene where a human character with significant amounts of bird DNA tries chocolate and regrets it. I'm not planning on killing her, but I do want to figure out an accurate amount of chocolate to give her for it to make sense. Looking at the treatment methods, I would probably want a milder case of theobromine poisoning but enough to be a close call, if that makes sense. How much chocolate do you think she'd need to have, and what would be the proper course of treatment?

Comments

[stepnix]

very rough quick search, "just a bite" is already seriously dangerous for birds. and with beaks that's not a very big bite at all.

However! Since she's not really a bird, just has sci-fi DNA science going on, you can "round down" the severity of that. So, one piece of dark chocolate->one close call with theobromine poisoning sounds plausible to me

[bluerosekatie]

Thank you! Yeah, I was looking into it and got a few things that seemed to say it went by body weight and others that said just a bite would be enough -- so that makes sense to me.