How much Butter is too much butter?

When you say "lid" I assume we are talking about tub butter.

Depending on the kind you got, we are already talking about, in fact, vegetable oil, rather than solid fat.  Plus, the tub margarine has an amazing amount of water and other non-lipid ingredients - so that if you melt a tablespoon of it in a pan, you'll notice only about a teaspoon of oil in there.

So your dog got, at most, a third cup of vegetable oil.  That's already pretty low risk.  And this is a raw fed dog, right?  The fats that are implicated in pancreas attacks are usually cooked animal fats, in substantial amounts, and are usually dogs that are kibble fed most of the time.  Plus overweight and there are other risk factors unrelated to the food consumed.  My 90 pound Maremma female gets about 1/2 cup of sunflower, cococut, canola, or olive oil in her food in the winter time and she does fine with that.

I'd say no reason to panic, particularly if there's no symptoms at this late date.  If it were me, and I had caught it earlier, I would have put the dog on a bland diet for a few days just in case. 

Vegetable oil doesn't digest as well as animal fat -- you're probably lucky you didn't see major diarreha.  Actual animal fat is pretty digestible usually altho like Brook Cove said a bland diet would have helped, but I would try to keep things really easy and bland for a while just in case the pancreas got whacked out.

The difference between veg oil and animal fat is that the dog can use animal fat better - many dogs lack the wherewithall to convert ALA to DHA and EPA - but the omega-6s are the same in both sources.  But, cooked animal fats have been converted to a form which takes some extra steps to digest safely - and gives the pancreas a workout.  The jury is still out on whether this truly is the trigger for acute pancreatitis, but it's safe to assume that if a dog is at high risk for pancreas troubles (ill, overweight, thyroid imbalance, senior, on liver-challenging drugs) - you don't want to add any straws to the camel's back!

Many margarines today are made with liquid oils in a natural state (not hydrogenated).  Given the choice, I'd feed raw animal fat - that's safest and best for a dog (ie, fish oil is terrific and you can feed quite a bit safely).  Then virgin, cold pressed, or only lightly processed veg oils.  Then mechanically (or low heat) processed veggie oils, and finally heat processed animal fats.  Animal fats processed in that way not only are changed greatly for the worse, but are highly oxidized and retain little value in terms of OFAs. 

Deciding what fats to include in a diet have to do with one's goals for that ingredient.  For a healthy dog, you can use about anything for energy, if you are paying attention to supplementation of antioxidants.  Sled dogs and herding dogs often are supplemented with products like Red Paw which is a blend of animal and vegetable fats.  Then specific needs usually require oils to be as unprocessed as possible.  omega-3s are particularly light and heat sensitive, but thankfully you don't need much of them to do the job.

 Thanks Becca and Callie.

Yes both dogs are raw fed.  No diarhea or anything.  I'm feeling pretty ok about it, though I'm a little miffed that one of them took the liberty of taking something off the table...thats a new one.  But there's nothing much to be done about that now...LOL.

Just a quick question though, but what exactly would you feed a raw fed dog as bland food?  We don't do grains at all so....?  Normally if I'm concerned about digestive issues, (and this happens with Crusher whenever we intruduce something new) I add some pumpkin and a bit of yogurt and thats all it normally takes for extras.