re: #273 zombie

Ah, you’re talking about liquids. Sure, something like shampoo is basically already a soup of toxic chemicals. And an animal can accidentally ingest and metabolize a liquid. But we’re talking about solids here.

The animal doesn’t have to metabolize it to be poisoned by it. In fact, the animal cannot metabolize it, as you’ve pointed out. The animal is still poisoned by it- in fact, some ingested poisons work because the difficulty in metabolizing them. Most of the others that work do so despite our bodies’ attempts at metabolizing them. Generally speaking, our bodies don’t produce substances that are harmful to us as a result of metabolism/catabolism without some means of controlling/limiting the harmful substances.

PKU is an example of what happens when these safeguards do fail, for anyone studying biology.