Is burro's tail safe for cats and dogs?
Sedum morganianum · Succulents
Non-toxic to cats and dogs
Sedum morganianum is confirmed by species. The beads drop at a touch and get chased across the floor, which is exactly why the listing is worth having.
Source: ASPCA Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants.
Burro's tail is on the ASPCA's non-toxic list for both cats and dogs, so the beads a cat knocks off it are a nuisance rather than an emergency. Sedum morganianum is the safe member of a shelf full of trailing succulents that are not: the catalogue records string of pearls as toxic at moderate severity, string of bananas and string of dolphins at mild, and the jade plant it often gets potted beside at moderate. Nothing about the way any of them are sold tells you that.
Worth knowing anyway
Safe to keep, though a mouthful of fleshy leaves can make an animal sick through sheer volume, and vomiting that carries on past a bout or two means a vet call. The more likely outcome is the plant losing. Every bead is attached by almost nothing, so a passing tail or a curious paw strips a stem bare, and the fallen leaves scatter across the floor where a dog will find them.
Living with one
Put it where nothing brushes past, which usually means a bracket or a high shelf rather than the bookcase a cat patrols on its evening round. Water is the other half of keeping one alive: the catalogue puts it on a roughly fourteen day cycle, and a burro's tail kept damp rots at the crown long before it looks thirsty. Every dropped bead will root in dry compost if you can be bothered.
How to care for burro's tail
The starting schedule and conditions Kounts Care sets up for this species. Watering adapts from there based on the daylight where you live.
- Water
- About every 14 days, less in winter
- Light
- Bright, indirect
- Humidity
- 30% to 50%
- Temperature
- 15C to 26C
- Soil pH
- 6 to 7
- Family
- Succulents
Let the app remember this for you
Kounts Care holds your plants and your pets in one household, so it checks every new plant against the cats and dogs you actually own, names them in the warning, and runs the check again over your existing plants the day a new animal arrives. Toxicity warnings are free at every tier.
In review with Apple · iPhone, iOS 26 · Five profiles free when it lands
Questions people actually ask
Is burro's tail the same as string of pearls?
No, and the difference is the one that matters in a pet home. They hang from the same kind of shelf and arrive on the same trolley, but string of pearls carries a toxic listing at moderate severity while burro's tail carries none. Of the others sold alongside them, string of turtles is confirmed non-toxic, and string of hearts is not covered by the ASPCA list at all, so it is recorded as unlisted rather than safe.
Why does my burro's tail keep losing its beads?
Handling, mostly. The leaves detach at the slightest knock, which is how the plant spreads itself, so repotting or shifting it to a new window always costs a few dozen. Thin, gappy growth is a separate problem: the catalogue asks for bright, indirect light, and a stem grown in a dim corner stretches and spaces its leaves further apart, which makes the bare patches look worse than they are.
My dog ate the leaves that fell on the floor. Is that a problem?
Not a poisoning one. Sedum morganianum is on the non-toxic list for dogs as well as cats, so scattered beads are not a reason to panic when you find the pot has been raided. Quantity is the only real issue, and a dog that has hoovered up a heap of them may be sick once. Sickness that carries on, or a dog that goes off its food, is worth a vet call.
I am getting a kitten. Does the app recheck my existing plants?
Yes. Adding a pet re-runs the safety check across every plant already on the profile rather than applying only to new ones, so a shelf that was fine for a dog gets reassessed for a cat. Nothing about that check sits behind a paid tier. Households share over iCloud, so the same result reaches whoever else lives with the plants.