Re: Are phenols in wood beddings really to blame for the death of small animals

Dear Frankie,

thanks for your question. I did a literature research on medline
 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/ ) looking for reports of toxic
effects of wood beddings. There are two kinds of publications:

1) Some papers report accidental contamination of the bedding materials
whith toxic materials - e.g. insecticides or pesticides that were
applied to the trees. This is an accident - you can't be 100 % sure that
it won't happen, but reliable producers will take care that their
materials are ok.
2) Pine woods do contain potentially toxic substances - e.g. phenols.
This was shown in vitro (this means: in experiments that didn't use
animals) - but the concentrations of these substances are usually very
low. And I didn't find any reports about effects on a healthy animal
under real life conditions.

I didn't find evidence that phenols in wood beddings can kill animals or
cause disease - however, researchers do recomend not to use pine shavings as 
bedding in long term carcinogenicity studies, just in case.
For everyday purposes other properties of the bedding seem to be more
important, like amount of dust in the bedding or sharp points that can
perforate the skin.

Hope this helps - if you are still in doubt you can look for different
bedding materials (e.g. corn cob pellets).
Eva