Tokyo is a black Labrador accustomed to climbing mountains effortlessly. That Sunday in July, at Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the United Kingdom, something changed within minutes: her legs stopped responding and she began losing and regaining consciousness over and over again.
Her owner, Christina Bluhme, a dog trainer from Esher, Surrey, watched her longtime companion fade away halfway up the slope in heavy rain. The Lochaber Mountain Rescue team, which happened to be nearby because of another emergency, carried Tokyo down on a stretcher from an altitude of 1.345 meters.
At the Crown Vets clinic in Fort William, the veterinarians reached an unsettling conclusion: everything indicated that the dog had ingested abandoned cannabis remnants on the trail. Canine brains have many more receptors for that substance than human brains, so the effect can be devastating. Tokyo returned home the next day, completely recovered, but Bluhme still remembers that day as one of the most terrifying of her life.
