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Dear Dumaurier I have a question pertaining to the use of tobacco products which is; can cats use tobacco? In the July 27’th 1978 Garfield comic strip; in the final frame it depicts Garfield smoking tobacco. [1] As you may or may not know, the creator of Garfield, Jim Davis based this character around cats he had growing up on his farm.[2] So a question arises; can any cat smoke tobacco? Or just Garfield? Doing some internet searches, I found a few youtube videos with promising tittles about cats smoking.[3][4] upon watching these videos it appears that the owners place unlit cigarettes in the cats mouths; notably though I found one video which depicted a cat, using its claws places an unlit cigarette in its own mouth.[5] Now the question would be, could this cat light the cigarette? Obviously the cat could not reliably use a lighter, lacking opposable thumbs, and it would be even more fanciful to imagine the cat using matches; but what if there was an open flame in the room, such as a fireplace or a candle; surely then the cat could proceed to light said cigarette? Searching this further led me to a halt, so I decided to pursue this from a different angle, medically, could a cat survive smoking a cigarette. Unfortunately, any studies I found on the subject either dealt with second hand smoke, such as second hand smoke causing Malignant Lymphoma in cats [6] or pertained to the oral consumption of cigarette butts. [7] The linked citation refers to the lethal nicotine dose in dogs, but suggests cats would be similar at around 20mg-100mg, or about 1-5 cigarettes. This is starting to look promising, as the oral dose would be higher in nicotine than the inhaled dose, so maybe a cat could smoke a cigarette, although I consider it inconclusive due to lack of certainty. I am at a loss of where to look from here, I searched a bit about the physiology of cats; interesting to note that they have less taste receptors, and can sense certain chemicals like nepetalactone in concentrations as low as 1 part per billion[8], and nepetalactone has been used in the past to flavour tobbaco. So I am writing this letter to find someone more knowledgeable about tobbaco to answer if cats could indeed use tobbaco.

Citations. [1] https://garfield.com/comic/1978/07/27 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield#History [3]

[4]

[5]

[6] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/156/3/268/71617 [7] https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20111007155524/http://www.aspcapro.org/animal-poison-control/documents/zj-toxbrief_0304.pdf [8] https://www.cat-world.com.au/all-about-catnip.html

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Dear Mr. Gopher:



For the safety of the cat, it is not recommended that they come in contact with tobacco in any form or the smoke as you stated from the studies you found regarding exposure. As with humans, there are health risks involved.



Please contact Health Canada at 1-866-318-1116 for more information.



Sincerely,



Justine Anderson

Representative, Consumer Relations



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