As the description of my blog clearly states, dogs do stupid things. One of those puzzling activities includes eating a variety of household and garden items. Some usual consumed subjects include anything from and in between: tissues, underwear, socks, candy wrappers, rocks, tennis balls, children’s toys, fuzz from the floor and whatever else catches their attention.
Needless to say, eating these things can have potentially dangerous effects on your dog’s health. Underwear just isn’t meant to be eaten…well…I guess you can refute that statement if you’ve been in an adult superstore lately and your mind is in the gutter, but you get my point.
Tissues aren’t usually a problem; they just make a huge mess around your house, but other items aren’t so forgiving on your dog’s digestive system. Some dogs may over-groom themselves or lick carpet/hardwood floors (okay the floor thing might just be my weird dog) and collect fuzz bunnies that have called your floor home for the past few weeks. This isn’t harmful unless they somehow ingest a lot of hair and fluff that can cause them to vomit. However, that should be the extent of the problem since dogs don’t have Velcro-like tongues like cats and, therefore, don’t usually get hairballs.
The big problems lie with the more solid or sharp objects. Eating candy wrappers may not seem like too big of a deal because they’re small, but they can become a choking hazard or cause intestinal blockage. One wrapper might just pass through their system, but if you’re one of those people who crumples all of your wrappers into a colossal aluminum ball, that can be a problem.
So next on the harmful list comes the clothing category. For some reason dogs have been known to eat socks, underwear, and other smaller clothing articles. Maybe they have foot fetishes and like the way your foot tastes after a hard day’s work. Nasty. I don’t know. Anyway, these obviously have potential to cause blockage in your dog’s digestive tract, but you may just be that one lucky person who gets to assist your dog when that thong comes out the other end.
Quick story about dogs and underwear. My boss brought his husky into work at the doggy hotel for group play a few months ago. My co-worker was the one watching the dogs and doing the usual poop scooping. She noticed our boss’s dog having problems pooping and called for help, because she couldn’t tell what was coming out of him. My boss went running back, whipped this object out of the dog’s butt and ran to throw it away. He went back to the room a few minutes later saying that his wife should have learned by then to pick up her thongs. Embarrassing? Yes. Funny as hell? Yea, that too, but he was also lucky he didn’t have any serious problems to deal with.
Now come the big kahunas of the victims to dog’s taste buds. Rocks. Toys. Tennis balls. Any of these are, more likely than not, going to require surgery to be removed. Paul Firm, a truck salesman at
“We would be in our pool and we would throw a ball to Z to go fetch, then he would bring the ball back and drop it in the pool. When we weren’t paying attention to him and his ball, he would pick up a rock and drop it into the pool. One time he jumped up to put it in the pool and must have swallowed it on the way up,” says Firm.
It took a few days for the family to realize that something was wrong and had to rush him over to the vet.
Firm says, “They x-rayed him and said ‘Oh he ate a rock.’ So they scheduled surgery and he had a ‘rockectomy.’”
Two surgeries, four weeks and about $5,000 later, Zeus was back in the yard, ready to play.
No one knows when a dog’s bad luck is going to catch up with him. They eat strange things and will continue to do so. It’s pretty much the luck of the draw as to what they’ll find next. It’s not possible to have an eye on your dog 24/7, but it is possible to reduce his risks of eating crazy things by picking up around the house and keeping things out of reach. Just cross your fingers that your dog is one step ahead in the evolutionary line.
