In the complaints the Center for Pet Safety collected, most toy injuries were not cuts or choking but pieces that got swallowed and blocked the gut. In September 2026 the Center for Pet Safety, a US nonprofit, published a report on toys and a one-page guide to sorting your pet by how it plays. This page puts the guide's questions in our own words, adds what vets say about choosing toys, and lists the signs that something has been swallowed.
The Center for Pet Safety's guide asks three questions. Does your pet play with toys? Does it like to chew? Has it ever destroyed a toy? The answers put a pet at low, moderate or high risk. A pet that chews pieces off toys, or rips out the stuffing and eats it, is high risk.
For any pet that loves toys, the guide adds three tips.
Edible chews are not risk free either. The ASPCA warns that dogs can choke on them, and the Center for Pet Safety's own page says the same.
The guide itself is free to download from the Center for Pet Safety's site. The same page has a list of chews it calls Safer Choice products. It does not publish how products are chosen, and it invites manufacturers to submit theirs, so we do not repeat the list here.
The report says toys are the product owners report to the Center for Pet Safety most often for injuries and deaths. Its figures come from complaints owners filed and from interviews.
That makes about one toy complaint in five a death. Three limits matter when you read those numbers. The report gives no total number of complaints and no date range. It counts only what people chose to report, so it cannot say how often toys hurt pets in general. And its headline, that toys are the top cause of injury and death, holds for the products reported to the organization, not for everything that harms pets.
The costs vary with what is measured. Owners told the Center for Pet Safety that removal with a scope typically cost $4,000 and surgery $8,000, and more than $15,000 when several operations were needed. Trupanion's average claim for a swallowed object in 2023 was $878, an average across every claim, including the ones that needed no surgery. Nationwide gives an average claim of $2,400, without saying which years it covers.
A chew that does not give can break a tooth. A VCA page written with a board-certified veterinary dentist is blunt about it.
The American Animal Hospital Association gives a quick test you can do in the shop.
Not every source agrees. The ASPCA allows natural bones sold for chewing, and Humane World for Animals suggests very hard rubber toys. The dental specialists and the Tufts veterinary school say no hard chews of any kind.
For cats the dangerous things are long and thin: string, thread, yarn, ribbon, tinsel, dental floss and hair ties. Vets call a swallowed object like this a linear foreign body. One end catches while the gut keeps pulling on the rest.
These are much more common in cats than in dogs, according to Merck. So wand toys and anything with string are for play together, and they go away afterwards.
If you see string, thread or ribbon hanging from your pet's mouth or its bottom, do not pull it and do not cut it. Call the vet.
Tigger is the cat in the FDA's example. The same page warns that the signs may take a few hours or several days to appear.
Cornell adds belly pain, diarrhea and dehydration, and VCA adds straining to pass stool. A cat with string caught around its tongue may paw at its mouth.
Do not make your pet vomit unless a vet tells you to.
Time matters because a blockage can cut off the blood supply to the gut.
An endoscope is a camera on a flexible tube passed down the throat, so there is no cut. Surgery opens the stomach or the intestine to take the object out.
Most do, when the problem is caught early. A study of 208 dogs and cats treated in general practice found that 91% recovered. Pets with a single object did best. String was harder.
The same study found that the longer the signs had gone on before treatment, the more pets died. A 2022 study of 72 dogs in Italy found the same about vomiting, and listed what the dogs had swallowed: children's toys were the most common, at 14%, with balls at 8%.
A 2023 study of 56 cats that had surgery at the University of Georgia, 18 of them for string, found that every cat survived. The studies cover different years and hospitals, which may explain why their results differ.
Sources read 23 September 2026. Quotes are copied word for word from each source.