Poison

So a bit of googling and calculating brings me this result; if my cat of 3kg did any of these:

• ate 220g milk chocolate (as a reference, one bar is usually around 200g)
• drank 12 cans of normal coke (or 8 half-liter bottles, or 2 big 2-liter bottles) 
• drank one 50ml cup of Starbucks coffee (pure, not some latte shit) 
• ate 28g of dark, unsweetened baking chocolate

he would most likely die. I strongly, very strongly, doubt he could fit 4l of coke, or 220g choclate, in his tiny stomach, or that he'd venture to drink strong, black coffee, but the baking chocolate could be a possible scenario I guess. Also he would get kinda sick before it got lethal. This is in one quick dose, but that doesn't mean it's fully safe eating smaller amounts. If it's done often it can also be dangerous since cats take up things again automatically from their own urine and so the poison could stay for a long time in their bodies and build up.

(As a side note, poisonous doses are almost always based on weight, and that's the case in this case. So dogs would have to eat a whole lot more to get sick. An adult, average German shepherd weighs about 11-13 times as much as my cat; that's 11-13 bars of chocolate. I don't know if they do the whole taking up nutrients from their own urine thing, because if they don't the poison also leaves their bodies faster.)

I also found out that the reason cats hate, and I mean *hate*, the smell of citrus fruits is because eating them makes them vomit.  They'd have to eat a damned lot of citrus fruit for it to get dangerous, and most likely they'd have thrown up long before that. Unfortunately for them they can't smell the poison (it's not just the caffeine) in coffee, tea or chocolate, that's actually more dangerous, and they don't always vomit it up if they eat enough to get seriously sick either.

So keep the baking chocolate away from the cat, or the cat away from the chocolate. Considering the nature of cats, I strongly suspect the first is easier.