A cat licking pollen off its fur can be enough. Lilies cause kidney failure.

Cut flowers are one of the most common ways a cat is poisoned in its own home, and lilies are the reason. They arrive as a gift, go in a vase on a table, and nobody thinks of them as a hazard.

The FDA's description of the risk is unusually direct: the entire lily plant is toxic — the stem, leaves, flowers, pollen, and even the water in a vase. Eating a small amount of a leaf or petal, or licking a few grains of pollen, can be enough.

That last route is the one people miss. A cat brushing past a bouquet gets pollen on its coat, then grooms itself. It never ate the plant at all.

Which ones

The FDA lists these as highly toxic:

• Asiatic lily (Lilium asiaticum)
• Easter lily (Lilium longiflorum)
• Japanese Show lily (Lilium speciosum)
• Oriental lily (Lilium orientalis)
• Rubrum lily (Lilium speciosum var. rubrum)
• Stargazer lily (Lilium 'Stargazer')
• Tiger lily (Lilium tigrinum)
• Wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum)
• Daylily (Hemerocallis species)

The daylily deserves the emphasis. It is not botanically a true lily, and people who have carefully learned to avoid Lilium sometimes assume it is therefore safe. It is not.

What happens, and when

0–12 hrs

reduced activity, drooling, vomiting, loss of appetite

12–24 hrs

increased urination and dehydration

24–72 hrs

kidney failure, which can be fatal

The early stage is the treatable one, and it is also the stage that looks least alarming. A quiet cat that drools a bit and skips a meal is easy to decide to keep an eye on.

By the time the picture is obviously serious, the kidneys have been damaged.

What a vet can do

Early treatment is aggressive and often effective: decontamination if the exposure was very recent, then intravenous fluids to support the kidneys through the period when the toxin is doing its damage, with blood tests to track kidney function.

The window is what determines the outcome. Cats treated within a few hours generally do well. Cats treated after kidney failure has set in often do not.

Prevention is simply not having them

There is no safe way to keep lilies in a house with a cat. Not high up — cats climb. Not in a closed room — doors get opened.

If you receive them as a gift, the practical answer is to pass them on to a household without a cat. Florists will substitute on request if you tell them there is a cat at home, and increasingly they label them.

Worth knowing for the same reason: several other common houseplants are toxic to cats to varying degrees, but very few carry lilies' combination of severity, speed and how little is needed.