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Barbara McCrary wrote:
> I have always heard that rhubarb, containing oxalic acid, was poisonous 
> to animals, but someone forgot to tell the deer around here and they ate 
> ALL the leaves off recently.
Geez... damn deer.  Next thing you know the blasted critters will start eating the 
Oleander.

At http://www.rhubarbinfo.com/rhubarb-poison.html:

From an MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) for Oxalic acid, LD50 (LD50 is the Median 
Lethal Dose, which is the dose of a drug or chemical predicted to produce a lethal 
effect in 50 percent of the subjects to whom the dose is given) in rats is 375 mg/kg. 
So for a person about 145 pounds (65.7 kg) that's about 25 grams of pure oxalic acid 
required to cause death. Rhubarb leaves are probably around 0.5% oxalic acid, so that 
you would need to eat quite a large serving of leaves, like 5 kg (11 lbs), to get 
that 24 grams of oxalic acid. Note that it will only require a fraction of that to 
cause sickness.

Because the stalk contains a bit more than 1/2 the Oxalic acid that the leaves do, 
that means if you want to kill yourself with Rhubarb, you'd have to eat about 20 
pounds of the stuff.  Extrapolating for weight for a horse as the above info is 
extrapolated from rats to humans, a 1000 pound horse would have to consume 7 times 
the fatal dosage for humans, 77 lbs of leaves or 140 lbs of Rhubarb.


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