MadSci Network: Biochemistry |
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
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