Lilies, beautiful but extremely life threatening to cats

I’ve always loved Christmas lillies and planted them a few years ago. The smell always means Christmas to me. But today, I cut them down and gave them to my mother in law, as we became cat owners this year after Shadow a wee black cat walked up our driveway and decided we were her humans (after an exhaustive search for her owners we decided she was ours too). I had previosly learned via a friend that lilies can kill cats by causing kidney failure. Cats will get the pollen on themselves and lick it off, but even coming into contact with vase water or eating a leaf is very dangerous too. There’s lots of sad stories online about cat owners having no idea about the risks and losing their cats within days of the cat ingesting part of the lily. Tiger and asiatic lillies are also toxic. I’ve been pulling off the stamens of my tiger lillies but I think they’ll go as well. Many people have commented that they’ve always had lilies and cats and didn’t know of the risk and never had an issue. But I know now and decided it’s not worth the risk no matter how small.

3 responses to “Lilies, beautiful but extremely life threatening to cats”

  1. Thanks for the advice! We have two cats (indoor cats) and I used to grow Lilies in my garden, but now, just in case — no more Lilies!

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: