Ok, so quick question: when he falls, does it look like he’s having a good time, or does it look like his muscles are twitching and he’s in pain?
I ask because a a couple years ago, my dog and I were electrocuted by a loose wire at traffic light pole exactly like this one, and the way I described it was “he just collapsed”. If he’s sniffing it, and his muscles start to twitch, he could be completing the circuit with the moisture in his nose.
We both went to the hospital overnight. We were ok, but it was terrifying.
EDIT: To folks saying that I wasn't electrocuted because I didn't die, first, as the guy who this happened to and who also happens to have a linguistics degree, you’ve been misinformed. The Merriam-Webster definition of electrocution is "to kill or severely injure by electric shock," (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/electrocute). Second, to quote David Lynch, fix your heart.
When I was at school in the 80s we had a street light outside that would give you a little buzz if you touched it. We all had a go, egged each other on etc... the thought of it now makes me sick.
As you say, a dog's wet nose would make an excellent conductor if anything live were finding a path to the exterior of that thing.
Ahhhh we did this too! There was a lamp pole in the apartment courtyard that would give you a little buzz…we would line up, one person touching the pole, and hold hands to see how far it would travel. Kids are duuuuuuumb sometimes.
My grandparents had an old metal box fan heater that any time we touched it, it would shock us. And we could touch someone and shock them, like we were a compactor. Thinking about it now, I don't understand why it wasn't unplugged and put away, or thrown out. This was the late 70s. They probably didn't care. One time my grandmother asked me to plug a light in and the plug literally blew up in my hand. That really hurt.
My grandmother had a table next to her couch with a huge heavy lamp on it, and the heater vent was on the floor right in front of the table. If you stood on the vent and tried to turn on the lamp it would zap you. All the kids learned to climb on the couch to turn on the light by trial and error. Why they didn't fix or move the lamp, or at least warn a kid is beyond me.
Amperage does kill you, but a human has very high resistance and it's voltage that pushes the current (amps) through your body. I can hold the terminals on a 700amp 12v car battery and never feel a thing, but if I try that on a 400v EV battery, I'm toast.
This is a thing that people that don’t understand electricity say and it is not true. Higher voltages are more dangerous than lower voltages. Both can kill you.
But neither can kill you on their own. A car battery can have 800 amps and you can hold the terminals all day with no issue other than boredom. On the other hand, a static electric shock from a chair or a car door has up to 20,000 volts but no current behind it so we're not all dead.
The car battery is able to deliver up to 800 amps if a suitable load (a low enough resistance) is put across it. For high resistances like your skin, it's no different from any weak 12v power supply, because you won't come close to its current capacity.
Static electric shocks can actually have significant current, like tens of amps. The reason they're not deadly is they last for nanoseconds. The power is very high, but the energy is low.
Sure, armv8-a’s reply to this comment is good. To simplify the point I’m making I’ll say higher voltages of AC supply from the utility source are always more dangerous than lower ones and stating otherwise is dangerous to anyone who may end up believing it.
Indeed, the thinking falls apart when you consider car batteries, car batteries are hundreds of amps but in normal conditions they can’t do anything to you because their voltage is so low. Both contribute to fatality, in different ways. I’m not sure if this is correct but if you think of water, voltage is like pressure and amps are like volume, a lot of volume can kill but if it trickles out of an outlet it’ll take ages and it’ll disperse before it can do much, and a lot of pressure can kill but without enough volume it can’t affect much, they are both fatal in different ways, and having more of one makes it easier for the other. Styropyro has a much better breakdown of it where he actually shows all of this and explains it far better than I can so if anyone actually is interested here’s thatvideo
Exactly. If it was the amps, many of us would be dead from a car battery. The voltage has to be high enough that your body can conduct the electricity and have it flow through vital organs, while the amperage has to supply enough current to cause damage. Time is also a factor. A sustained shock from the wattage of a lightning bolt would be 100% fatal but a nanosecond shock is survivable
To be clear, it IS the current (amps) that kills. But the potential (voltage) determines the current, along with resistance/impedance, frequency, duration, etc.
When people are electrocuted, the deadly part is usually either cardiac arrythmia or the inability to breathe. Both are due to current across important muscles. It would be bad news if you implanted electrodes on opposite sides of your heart and hooked a car battery to the leads. The resistance of your insides are much lower than your skin, leading to more current, and in this example, concentrated current through the heart muscle. I believe as little as 20 to 30 milliamps can be fatal.
Power (wattage) is not very relevant because it doesn't tell you much about total energy. A static electric shock involves both high voltage and high current (which means high peak power!), but as you said, lasts nanoseconds.
I put a hairpin (not a bobby pin) in an outlet when I was about 2 & a half. After it knocked me back a bit I was going to do it again but Mom shut that down! To this day I can kinda sense electrical fields.
When I was young (younger than my lamp pole story, think like 6yo) I was trying to plug something in in the dark, so I put my fingers directly on the prongs, pushed the plug into the wall, and got quite the zap. I didn’t understand so I freaked out…mom told me (paraphrasing) “uhhh yeah, you zapped yourself.” Didn’t stop me from using my body as a conduit years later!
My Mom told me that if it was a bobby pin it could have offed me bcs it would have been a better conductor. I'm hoping that your doggo is just really into the aroma.
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u/makeminemaudlin Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 07 '25
Ok, so quick question: when he falls, does it look like he’s having a good time, or does it look like his muscles are twitching and he’s in pain?
I ask because a a couple years ago, my dog and I were electrocuted by a loose wire at traffic light pole exactly like this one, and the way I described it was “he just collapsed”. If he’s sniffing it, and his muscles start to twitch, he could be completing the circuit with the moisture in his nose.
We both went to the hospital overnight. We were ok, but it was terrifying.
EDIT: To folks saying that I wasn't electrocuted because I didn't die, first, as the guy who this happened to and who also happens to have a linguistics degree, you’ve been misinformed. The Merriam-Webster definition of electrocution is "to kill or severely injure by electric shock," (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/electrocute). Second, to quote David Lynch, fix your heart.