I’m starting to think so. Guess where she is today?
At the vet’s. Being operated on. Again.
Remember the chicken skewer disaster last year? Baby Duck dropped his chicken skewer, she pounced and swallowed it whole. Expensive vet bills ensued.
Just one of those things, you think. You can’t really expect a dog not to try and gobble manna from heaven, can you? Shame Baby Duck wasn’t fast enough to grab the skewer before she did, but what can you do? A once-in-a-lifetime freak accident.
Or not, as it turns out.
No, Baby Duck hasn’t dropped any more skewers. Two Planks just seems to have even fewer brain cells than we’d thought.
On Monday she vomited a couple of times. Nothing unusual there – till the Carnivore noticed weird streamer-like things in it. White, about 5 mm wide, made of some kind of light plastic or fabric. We wracked out brains but couldn’t imagine what she’d eaten, or where she’d found it. Could some packaging have blown over the fence from the building work next door? It seemed unlikely, but what else were we to think? She will occasionally chew on things she finds in the backyard, but she doesn’t eat things out of the house – not since her puppy days.
Except now she does, apparently.
Yesterday morning there was more vomit and she wouldn’t eat breakfast, so we took her to the vet. Still mystified, we showed the streamer thing to the vet. It wasn’t until Drama Duck came home that we identified it. It was ribbon. She’d left a spool of it on her bedroom floor after a friend wrapped a present on the weekend. The next day she’d noticed the spool was broken and empty, but just assumed her friend must have used more ribbon than she’d thought.
I’m still shaking my head over this one. The chicken skewer I could understand. That was food. But ribbon? What on earth possessed the stupid animal? Who sees a spool of ribbon and thinks hmmm, that looks tasty?
So today the vet has the delightful job of hunting through her innards for it. Who knows how much is in there? 10 m? 20? It was originally a 50 m spool, but we don’t know how much was left on it when she decided to chow down on it. Several metres has already been up-chucked all over our backyard, but there’s obviously still enough in there to block up the works.
The vet tells me he’s known dogs to eat padlocks, mobile phones, even remote controls. Ribbon seems almost tame by comparison, but unfortunately, being long and linear, it's a devil to get out again. Stupid bloody dog.
Has anybody else got any good stupid-things-my-pet-has-done stories? Please tell me I'm not the only one!
I've heard that cats will eat rubber bands and hair ties and tinsel.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard of a dog eating ribbon, though. I wonder how she managed to swallow all that?
In great greedy gulps, I imagine, the same way she eats everything else! Retrievers are notorious for loving their food -- they'll eat till they're literally sick. I just never heard before that they'd do it with things that weren't food too.
DeleteSigh.
My Ridgeback ate/drank an entire bottle of strawberry scented shampoo. called the vet. he told me i was going to have a very sick miserable dog. there would be soap and everything else coming out both ends and that i probably shouldn't let him in the house. he was correct.
ReplyDeletebut at least it didn't require expensive surgery,
maggie
Oooh, nasty! Poor dog. They're their own worst enemies, aren't they!
DeleteThe cat - a 2yo ginger Tom rescued from a building site and appropriately named Rubble - played with an empty toilet roll, stuffed with an A4 sheet of paper and tied with 2m of cotton string from the cooking drawer for two weeks. And then... ate the string, all 2m of it.
ReplyDeleteLuckily it was cotton and was apparently completely digested for it never made another appearance at either end.
The whole house has now been made Rubble-friendly given that his first reaction to anything that he can get in his mouth (including the doors and human flesh) is to gnaw on it. Batteries, rubber bands, plugs, plugpacks, pens, pencils, cables, paint brushes, brooms, cardboard boxes, Friskies, and one of his favourites, feet (human).
And, oh, yes - trust me Rubble, cats don't eat lettuce ... yeah right, Rubble does actually eat lettuce leaves. He still draws the line at mandarins (and citrus in general), so we now have a fruit bowl full of mandarins :)
Anonymous? Well, yes, I've forgotten my my name - you know, the June event came and went and not a peep .
Souonds worse than having a toddler! At least they don't bite your feet. Hope the Rubble-proofing holds up!
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