Tokyo, a 5-year-old black Labrador retriever, began swaying like she was drunk about three hours into a July 5 climb of Ben Nevis, then could not walk at all, her owner Christina Bluhme told the Associated Press on Monday [1]. Near the peak of Britain's 4,413-foot mountain, with the weather turned to rain and the temperature dropped to 41 F, Bluhme abandoned the summit. "I said, listen, we've got to turn around and get her down," she recalled. "There's something completely wrong here" [1].

When the paper first covered this rescue, it kept the cause as suspected rather than proven, and Monday's fuller account does not close that gap: no trail sample identified what Tokyo ate. AP holds the same line, reporting she "apparently ingested cannabis" [1]. Crown Vets in Fort William first suspected a spinal injury; a senior vet, watching the 55-pound dog drift in and out of consciousness, judged it a neurotoxin, and a poison-control consult matched her symptoms to cannabis intoxication [1]. Activated charcoal brought a full overnight recovery. The bill ran 1,000 pounds, about $1,335 [1].

The shareable version is a stoned dog carried off Britain's highest peak by the volunteer Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team, who stretchered her to the trailhead in an hour. AP instead files it as service reporting: marijuana entered the ASPCA's top-10 list of pet toxins for the first time in 2023, with poison-control calls up 10 percent in a year and nearly threefold over five [1]. Feeds run the rescue as comedy; AP runs it as a warning about a toxin that keeps sending more dogs to the vet.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York