Doggone digestive problems a global epidemic

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/04/2018 (3020 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I hate to start your Monday with a complaint, but I am having a hard time believing I still have not won a major journalism prize for exposing a terrifying global trend.

I am referring, of course, to the trend wherein pet dogs eat things they are not supposed to, thereby forcing innocent owners and professional veterinarians to retrieve these items from their (I’m talking about the dogs’) gastrointestinal systems.

This trend — which I am now considering upgrading to “major worldwide epidemic” — raised its ugly head again not long ago, when my son and his girlfriend noticed their rescue dog, Finn, a roughly three-year-old collie-shepherd cross that resembles a gigantic nose with four spindly legs, was acting strangely.

A visit to the vet’s office confirmed Finn, a large, friendly dog with a brain the size of a cashew and the appetite of a great white shark, had gobbled down a hefty, purple rubber squeaky toy that resembled the world’s largest gummy bear.

It cost something like $2,000 to have the slimy remnants of the gummy bear surgically removed from Finn’s digestive system. (This is the same dog that almost burned my son’s house to the ground when, while trying to pull a pot down from the stove, managed to turn the stove on with one of his gangly paws, starting a small fire that required a visit from the local fire station.)

I would like to tell you this is the first time this disconcerting canine culinary trend has struck close to home, but I would be lying.

A few years ago, I bravely launched the My Dog is Worse Than Your Dog contest, wherein I offered lame prizes in exchange for readers sharing stories of extremely bad canine behaviour.

The inspiration for the contest came from two dramatic incidents: 1) When my wife and I returned home to discover our miniature wiener dog, Zoe, had gobbled down a chunk of our living-room carpet; and 2) When my sister-in-law’s beagle-basset cross stole her purse and chowed down on her MasterCard.

The winner of that contest? It was Billy the beagle, who knocked over his family’s Christmas tree and scoffed down an ornament decorated with hundreds of miniature marshmallows and sequins, all of which were attached with pointy straight pins.

Not content with ingesting 103 straight pins, Billy went on to consume 14 paraffin tea lights before breaking into his owner’s liquor cabinet and licking up enough hooch to give him a serious canine hangover.

You probably think I am making too much out of a few misguided canines, but tragically this situation is much like a giant iceberg comprised of frozen dog saliva, which, when flipped over, reveals hundreds of rogue dogs eating anything they can sink their teeth into.

I base that on the fact every year Veterinary Practice News magazine holds its annual “They ate WHAT?” contest, wherein vets compete to see who has removed the oddest item from an animal.

According to what I read online, last year’s winner was Leia, a six-month-old English bulldog from Massachusetts that horked down a huge rib bone, and when the vet surgically removed the bone, it was discovered Leia had also swallowed an entire bone-shaped chew toy.

On a personal level, I was more moved by the story of one of the runners-up, Lola, a seven-kilogram tortoise who required surgery to remove (dramatic pause to ratchet up the excitement) “a 1.5-centimetre turtle pendant of unknown origin.” Yes, the turtle swallowed a turtle.

Also compelling was the so-called “Silver Spoons Case” from McKees Rocks, Pa., involving a hungry Labrador retriever. Here’s what Veterinary Practice News said of the case: “This owner was used to giving her Labrador retriever serving spoons full of peanut butter, but she didn’t notice that the spoons were disappearing.”

Yes, if your cutlery begins to vanish, the astute pet owner will realize something is amiss, which reminds me of my sister’s Labrador, which for years would take knives and forks from the kitchen and hide them under the covers in my sister’s bed, which made hopping in the sack a potentially lethal exercise.

Not collecting any prize money, but earning an “honourable mention” in the contest was Otis, an eight-year-old male Old English Bulldog, that made a habit of feasting on children’s toys. “Otis passed two little metal dinosaurs… but two additional dinosaurs were removed surgically, along with various other debris,” the veterinary magazine noted.

On the upside, not all the weird things dogs eat have to be removed on the operating table. Some return in a more natural, albeit more disgusting, manner that we normally do not discuss in a family newspaper.

For example — and this may be my favourite dog story of all time — a Wisconsin woman named Lois Matykowski and her dog, Tucker, made headlines around the world recently for an incident that put everyone’s personal hygiene at serious risk.

What happened was Matykowski was eating Popsicles with her granddaughter when the child’s frozen treat mysteriously vanished… into the jaws of Tucker, who sucked down the Popsicle, stick and all.

The exciting part is that two days later, Tucker’s digestive system went into reverse thruster mode on the living-room carpet, because Rule No. 1 in the Dog Handbook states: “Never throw up outside if there’s a perfectly good carpet in the house.”

When she cleaned up the mess, Matykowski found a sparkly surprise — the diamond wedding ring she’d lost five years before and had given up hope of ever finding. “I kid you not. My wedding ring was in Tucker’s puke,” she chirped, noting the ring had apparently been dislodged when the dog ate the Popsicle stick.

We are out of room now, which is good, because I won’t be able to tell you what happened when my late basset hound Cooper once gobbled down an entire ear of corn on the cob, which worked its way through his digestive system like a small jungle creature passing through a python.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to check my mailbox, because that (bad word) Pulitzer Prize should be arriving any day now.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca