What Happens If (You or Your Pets) Eat The Raw Cannabis Leaves

If you are growing at home and your cat or dog gets into your grow room, is it a medical emergency?

Every serious stoner with a pet has been in this predicament. You are sitting at home, minding your own business, when the next thing you know, your pet has swallowed some of your marijuana, eaten your plant leaves, or chewed on a bud. What do you do about it? Well don’t panic, first of all, and then work your way up from there.

Here’s what you ought to do if your animals eat the marijuana plant, and what happens if you eat the leaves instead of the bud of your plants.

What’s in Cannabis Leaves?

First of all, let’s talk about the makeup of your average cannabis leaf, to make sure it’s not poisonous to you. When we grow marijuana, we can actually use all the parts of the plant. When we are harvesting the buds, we trim the leaf off so that it doesn’t affect the smoke. Other than taste and potency, however, there isn’t a lot of difference between the bud and the leaves. There are 144 known cannabinoids in cannabis, the leaves contain those.

When we do trim a harvest, the offcuts are usually used to make cannabutter and other edibles. Cannabis leaves are also used to make juices, teas, and can be added to food to boost your CBD intake. There are generally two sets of leaves. The sugar leaves are smaller and gather near buds. They are higher in THC. The fan leaves are bigger and form the base of the plant. These are usually used to store water and can be removed first during trimming.^[1]

What Happens if you Eat Raw Cannabis Leaves?

You shouldn’t be able to eat raw cannabis leaves if you are buying bud, since they shouldn’t come with leaves attached. If your weed regularly does come and it’s leafy, switch supplier. HybridFast have excellent cannabis products that can help you keep leafiness to a minimum.

Secondly, your ability to eat raw cannabis leaves is dependent on your access to them. So, if you’re not growing weed, you shouldn’t really need to worry about eating the leaves.

For the rest of us, this is what happens when you consume the compounds found in cannabis leaves…

Eating Raw Cannabis Leaves Can Make You High

If you are eating those sugar leaves, we talked about earlier, then the trichomes growing alongside them will have dusted them in a find coating of THC which resembles sugar. Since they are rich in THC, you might well get high in the same way that any other edible would affect you. Of course, if you are a pet parent and your cat or dog is chowing down on sugar leaves, you are going to have a stoned pet.

However, keep in mind that raw weed leaves don’t go through the THC>THCA process caused by decarboxylation, so you will experience a less intense high.

What Happens if Animals Eat the Marijuana Plant?

It depends on the animal. Dogs and cats have endocannabinoid systems just like humans do^[2], which means that marijuana was probably once part of their diet from an evolutionary standpoint. Other animals, such as cows and horses, would probably have munched it accidentally back when it grew wild, before it was outlawed in most places.

This means that animals can handle their pot to a certain extent. However, this doesn’t mean that you should start dosing your pet. While CBD for pets is a new idea that is being heavily marketed, THC can have an adverse effect on the brain and might even cause seizures. For this reason, you should be extra careful about letting your pet eat raw cannabis leaves, even if it is the fan leaves.