Our new puppy, Blue, eats or chews everything and anything. The other morning, I took him out and was horrified as his urine was blood red and his stools black – all I could think of was intestinal bleeding. He and I raced over to the vet’s.
Meanwhile, my husband called and said, “I bet that dog ate some beet peels out of the compost.” After a hefty bill, my vet said he’d learned something new after thirty years. Beeturia is the name for the process by which fresh beets turn your urine and stools dark; it affects about fifteen percent of people and obviously a certain number of dogs. If you serve fresh beets to uninitiated friends, you’ll do them a kindness to tell them that they don’t need to panic if when they next go to the bathroom they have a surprise.
