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

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Hi, I asked my sister and she said 20 mg/kg of weight would make them sick, but she hasn't gotten back to me how much would kill them (or almost kill them). I don't she's actually had a case of it but she's been a vet for about 25 years. She gave me the example of one M&M which is 0.7 g and there are ~2 mg/g of methylxanthines (theobromine being one) in milk chocolate so 1.4 mg of it in one M&M. She used the example of a macaw being .5 kg so it would have to eat at least 10 M&Ms to even make it sick and it would probably start vomiting way before that.

FYI, she said avocados are more of a problem than chocolate. Hope this is helpful!

[pallas_rose]

As a human doctor I have nothing to contribute but wanted to note that I am very glad chocolate is not poisonous to us... I ate a leftover Lindt gold bunny yesterday and it was divine

[full_metal_ox]

Conversely! She might flabbergast everyone with her capsaicin tolerance, scarfing down Double-Dog Dare chili pepper cultivars as if they were cherry tomatoes. (Wild chiles evolved to spread their seeds by being eaten and excreted by small songbirds; capsaicin is a mammal repellent.)