Our Australian Shepherd, Mittsy, was pretty much a normal puppy as far as chewing on things goes. She did the shoe thing and the wooden legs on our kitchen chairs. The puppy chewing phase lasted until she was about 15 months old.
After that we could be certain that our furniture was safe, but there was never a month that would go by without Mittsy testing something new to see if it was edible. Thank goodness for pet gates, or we probably wouldn’t have much left of our house and home.
You know how there are exceptions to every rule right? Well Mittsy’s cullinary plan seemed to defy every rule written about dangerous items for dogs to ingest.
One example of this was about a week or so after the Easter holiday. One of my daughters had left her chocolate Easter egg stash on the floor in her room. Mittsy devoured I’m guessing about a pound or more of chocolate Easter eggs, wrappers and all.
Sure she was ill the next day, but she soon recovered and somehow decided that the short period of agony was worth the wonderful taste of chocolate. Every year she would do her best to find the chocolates stashed somewhere in our children’s rooms. It was like her very own Easter egg hunt.
With Easter out of the way Mittsy needed something more along the lines of a regularly available gourmet meal. With a house full of teen-aged girls there was always one tasty treat that Mittsy could always easily get her paws on. Who would have believed that lipstick would become a favorite.
Have you ever tried to remove red lipstick from a beige carpet. Well in our house it happened so frequently that we became experts at it. The household pet gate never seemed to be enough of a deterent, because our daughters would leave their lipstick all over the house. Easy pickings for Mittsy.
Our biggest surprise however, was yet to come.
Our family was invited to spend a week-end at a friend’s cottage one year, dog included. This cottage was fairly remote and had several acres of bush land around it, so it was a very special outing for all of us. Fortunately for Mittsy there would be other dogs there to play with.
The majority of this infamous weekend was absolutely fabulous. Unfortunately, on the day we were to leave for home, Mittsy decided that she would need lots of food to tide her over on the four hour trip home. She searched high and low looking for any kind of eats she could find.
Her first find was the french loaf that we had been saving for that evening’s Italian feast. She managed to eat the whole loaf of bread before anyone caught her. You would think that this would fill her up, but oh no, not Mittsy.
Believe it or not, I had gone into the cottage looking for a frisbee when something caught my eye out of the cottage’s back window. There was Mittsy chewing on anything she could find in our friend’s compost heap …yuck.
Within half an hour, Mittsy was so sick that she couldn’t even lift her head. It was nearly 90 degrees outside and yet the breath from Mittsy’s mouth was forming steam in the air.
This cottage was in the middle of nowhere, so we would need to travel for four hours to get to the nearest vet. We decided to make a run for it and so said our goodbyes and jumped in the car. My wife drove and I sat with a blanket on my lap and Mittsy laying on the blanket.
There were several stops on the way home as Mittsy tried to clear the contents of her stomach. You can’t believe how disgusting that was. Our kids wanted to get out of the car and walk home.
I guess she did a good job purging herself, because by the time we got home, Mittsy was raring to go and was running around our yard looking for something to play with, or eat.
We kept an eye on her that night and throughout the next day, but other than a slight loss of appetite she seemed quite normal. She wanted lots of fresh water, and we made sure that her bowl was full. If she could speak, I’m sure that she would brag about having a cast iron stomach. It took the rest of us much longer to recuperate.
Mail this post
