They Ate What?
August 31, 2014 8:52 AM   Subscribe

Animal hospitals in Texas, Florida, and Oregon won Veterinary Practice News’ ninth annual radiograph contest, which awards prizes for x-rays of unusual items found in pets' stomachs. posted by item (32 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble



 
OK,

next time the random sock goes missing I'll know where to look.

(43? Really?!?)
posted by CrowGoat at 9:08 AM on August 31, 2014


I take issue with the judges of this contest. The true winner is clearly a tie between the rubber duckie flock and the barbie banana. You have to judge the entire story that comes to light: in the one, the dog gets all excited and tail-waggy when the toddler's in the bath. Yay! Today I might get to eat another duck! is in his doggy brain. Some bathtimes, he never gets the opportunity; the splashing toddler keeps the duck away from him. But Woof is not deterred, he knows his rubber ducky moment will come again.

In the other, the image of a tame bearded dragon just chilling in Barbie's Dream House as lizards do is just a wonderful mental image. Casually slurping up the toy banana is just icing.

By contrast, the alleged winner is just a frog with pica. I'm sorry the frog has pica, and hope it gets the help it needs, but it's just not as entertaining. Need better judges next year!
posted by Drastic at 9:12 AM on August 31, 2014 [29 favorites]


Today I learned that dogs will eat turtle tank gravel if you pour barbecue grease on it.
posted by tommasz at 9:23 AM on August 31, 2014 [7 favorites]


43 and a half socks. Was the other half fully digested? Did the dog look down and think man, I really want to finish that, but I just can't?
posted by Flannery Culp at 9:23 AM on August 31, 2014 [15 favorites]


Now I'm concerned about the bearded dragon. They conspicuously left off the after treatment status there.
posted by tavella at 9:28 AM on August 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


The rubber duckies should have won.
posted by azpenguin at 9:34 AM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Did the dog look down and think man, I really want to finish that, but I just can't?

clearly he had moved out of agitate into the spin cycle
posted by pyramid termite at 9:36 AM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


I wish I'd gotten a picture of this. My Lab, as a puppy, crawled under the car and ate the plastic fuel sensor. When I started the car, fuel poured all over the drive. Cost me $500 to get it fixed.
posted by etaoin at 9:41 AM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Our cats are positively tame by comparison. One of them eats the usual cat things - paper products, bugs, etc. - but he also eats my girlfriend's hair off the floor. Which means he usually ends up passing a lovely string of turd pearls in the litter box.

One day, about five minutes before we were leaving the house, we hear him tear out of the litter box and start racing around. He had attempted to poop, but the hair was still stuck in his butt and he had a turd dangling behind him. It took both of us to capture him and remove the offending bits that had freaked him out so he wouldn't smear poop all over the furniture.
posted by backseatpilot at 9:42 AM on August 31, 2014 [4 favorites]


Many years ago, I saw something red sticking out of the rear end of Joie, the world's oddest cat. It was red thread. I pulled, and six inches of embroidery floss came out of her butt, as did the large needle it was still threaded through.

I am still upset.
posted by Ink-stained wretch at 10:25 AM on August 31, 2014 [14 favorites]


Backseatpilot, my cat has done the same thing! Including racing around chased by a turd attached to him by my hair.
posted by SpaceWarp13 at 10:29 AM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


My sister's St. Bernard once stopped eating and pooping. After a couple of days, she took him to the vet, and they figured he had some blockage, but it would cost a lot to do the surgery to remove it. The vet recommended waiting a day or so to see what happened. She took him outside, and on the way to the car, he squatted, and out came an entire pair of panty-hose.

He was damned lucky he didn't die.
posted by suelac at 10:34 AM on August 31, 2014 [2 favorites]


the alleged winner is just a frog with pica.

To be fair, it's a frog with a lot of pica: it could not be more full of gravel.

I too was wondering "why no cats". Wow, dogs really will eat anything.

Also of note: they carefully arranged up the 5 ducks in order of ingestion for the photograph.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:13 AM on August 31, 2014


Freddie the cat used to do similar magic tricks with that thin plastic "Easter grass" that goes in the basket under the chocolate bunny/Reese's eggs. It would disappear, then a few days later the telltale green wisps would start to emerge, waving cheerfully behind him like some sort of symbiotic butt worm. And of course, that stuff is rough on the edges and you don't want to pull on it and risk damaging the area, so we just sort of kept watch and eventually you'd find it draped on the couch somewhere and make a face and throw it away.

This was before Elliot the poodle went parkouring and ate two chocolate bunnies and had gastritis all over the house. After that, Easter baskets stopped being quite the thing in the weasel household.
posted by theweasel at 11:17 AM on August 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


This makes me feel better about my dog eating a keychain sized etch-a-sketch as a puppy. He was well mannered enough to bite it in half rather than gulping it whole. It required an awkward call to poison control, but did no lasting damage.
posted by peppermind at 11:22 AM on August 31, 2014


For me, the winner is still the skewer. That's some professional grade stupid eating; that dog could have a future in sword-swallowing.
posted by deludingmyself at 11:34 AM on August 31, 2014


I had an iguana in college who stopped eating and it turned out to be because it ate my underwear.

The vet techs never failed to re-tell the story in front of me whenever we went in for subsequent visits.
posted by nev at 11:35 AM on August 31, 2014 [4 favorites]


I'll argue that the pile of mush that turns out to be socks is not a great x-ray either. The lightbulb is better.
posted by jeather at 1:17 PM on August 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


Many years ago we used to get the long strings of tinsel for xmas trees. That ended after pulling yards out of it out of the kitten's end.
posted by leslies at 2:44 PM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


My household growing up never used tinsel or Easter-basket grass, precisely because the cats would probably eat it.

My current cat keeps chewing my shoelaces until he gnaws off a length, which he then swallows. I'm not trained to keep shoes away from cats, so I keep forgetting to put them somewhere he can't get them.
posted by jaguar at 3:05 PM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


People like to say their dogs 'ate' things when they have only chewed, shredded, and redecorated the house with them. I used to do that too. My dog Josie is a roadside rescue mutt who I assume is mostly blackmouth cur. She's a bit over a year old and possessed with a horrible case of the Teenaged Puppy Stupids. She cured me of the misuse of 'ate' in five days.

First she ate my beanbag face mask. It was really nice, made of silk, full of some kind of small heavy seeds or beans, and I'd gotten it from the Body Shop over a decade ago. I kept it in the freezer and put it over my eyes when I got headaches. Things that taste like faces are irresistible to dogs (my previous dog, a Boxer, liked to demolish telephones) and when Josie got the chance to shred it, she did.

When I went to retrieve the thing, she decided she'd keep her new toy where I could never get it. She promptly swallowed a large piece of blue silk with a couple of mystery beans probably still inside it.

(I just took a small plastic cup away from her - Josie where did you FIND that - and tossed her a Nylabone, a Kong ball, and a large beef bone. She has her own toys, but mine are more fun.)

When I saw the silk disappear down her throat, I called the ASPCA emergency hotline. It's a good deal for dogs like this one. After some dickering over what kind of beans were in the mask (I don't know, brown ones, and mostly they are in my bed right now) I was told to administer hydrogen peroxide and bring back the cloth.

Which I did. Dog goes urp! Curses! Foiled again!

Two days later she ate - again, ingested completely - a full used coffee filter which I stupidly set on the counter so I could free a hand to open the cupboard where the trash can is kept. It's in there because she cannot yet open cabinets.

(Josie, don't chew my comforter. STAHP. We can't go to the park today, it's raining, and I guarantee you are not as upset about that as I am.)

I watched her snarf the coffee filter down, too slow to stop her, and tiredly dosed her with more peroxide, taking her outside to wait. Urp. You want it back, fine, you can have it back.

Then Josie, being an agreeable sort of dog, decided that if I liked it so much when she vomited, she'd keep it up. In my bed. On the floor. Not, fortunately, in the car.

Vet determined that all this retrieval of bad things had upset her stomach, and prescribed a horrible week where I had to dissolve enormous pills in water and then syringe the awful-tasting things down her gob. That was a struggle three times daily. Peanut butter did not help.

(Yes, Josie. Chew the nylabone. Good girl. Gooood girl. Chew it into a shiv if you must. You don't have thumbs, that doesn't scare me.)

She's a good dog, despite all of this. I look forward to the day when her brain matures to fit her gigantic body and she stops acting like such a thrice-damned idiot.
posted by cmyk at 3:57 PM on August 31, 2014 [9 favorites]


Our dog has managed to do the hanging-poop trick a few times, though we've never seen her eat anything string-like so what she ate and where she found it remains a mystery. But a 15-pound dachshund half-breed running in circles because the poop didn't go away remains one of the funniest (and grossest) things I've seen.
posted by spitefulcrow at 4:22 PM on August 31, 2014


Yes, I fully expect to take Spice in one day and have a frog xray done.

She doesn't eat gravel, she just chases blowing bits of hay and straw with her tongue out, and the gravel sticks when she tries to grab them. Or maybe all the hay and straw she chews and swallows will act as enough roughage to get the rocks through.

But she's already been xrayed with 'gravel gut' so I feel like I'm on borrowed time re: surgery.
posted by BlueHorse at 5:17 PM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


My dog ate a whole packet of crayons once. His poop the next day was so pretty!
posted by lollusc at 6:35 PM on August 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


My Labrador retriever, Zoe started looking pitiful. After much drooling and retching I brought her to the vet. Lo and behold she passed a cloth sausage casing two days into her supervised overnight 3 day stay at the vets. Vet bill was $700. She was released on Thursday evening. Friday evening when I returned home from work, she was drooling and her abdomen was tense and hard as a rock. I took her to the emergency vet hospital where an x-ray showed her intestine had "mushroomed" over itself causing a strangulated bowel. Emergency surgery was performed at 11:30pm. A 18" section of intestine was removed. She returned home several days later in much better spirits. Emergency vet bill, $5300. She is doing fine as we speak.

Where the cloth sausage casing came from is still a mystery, but it originated at Hill-shire Farms. (the print was still legible)
posted by JujuB at 7:02 PM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


I just found my old vet on that list!
posted by GoLikeHellMachine at 7:54 PM on August 31, 2014


People, you know the rules. We need pictures of these horrible animals.

Especially the frog, I love frogs.
posted by cmyk at 7:56 PM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm happy to provide an X-ray of my own dog Hope (is this self-linking? sorry!). She'd ingested two tennis balls by chewing each one nearly in half and then swallowing it. We saw the 2nd one go in several days before she started presenting any signs up illness, so we were pretty surprised when the vet found a two. Bit of advice - don't ever let your dog chew on a tennis ball unsupervised. We never did, but as an adolescent Hope could find one at the park and have it in two pieces in about 30 seconds.

Second bit of advice - mostly re:cmyk's post - the first abdominal surgery our dog needed was to have part of Nylabone removed from her intestines. She'd chewed the end off one of hers, swallowed it, and it had completely plugged her intestines. Also bad: don't show up well on X-rays, so it was hard to diagnose. After that experience I don't miss a chance to flag them as dangerous dog toys, at least for strong chewers.
posted by pkingdesign at 11:47 PM on August 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Sorry, kids--I know I told you I would consider getting a puppy, but then I read some stuff on Metafilter and...no. Just no.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:11 AM on September 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


One of the first times Mom took our family dog, KC, to the groomers', he came back with a length of orange lace tied in a bow around his neck. KC didn't like it, and neither did Dad, who moved to take it off - but Mom said no, wait for her to get a picture at least. So Mom went off looking for the camera while KC alternated between his usual hyper running around the living room and sitting down to paw at the bow.

But Mom was a good five minutes locating the camera. When she came back to the living room, the bow was gone. She accused the rest of us of taking it off, but we swore ignorance; I mentioned I'd seen him pawing at it, and we went looking for it to tie it back on, but couldn't find it.

The next morning, we were all getting up and ready for school and work and such; Dad let KC out onto the front yard for his morning constitutional, and then went to start washing the breakfast dishes. I saw him glance out the window at KC, and then do a double take. Then he turned and announced to the rest of the house: "I just found the bow!"

When telling others about the event later, my father found the phrase "like soap-on-a-rope" to be very useful.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:44 AM on September 2, 2014


"Dogs are so stupid"
- cats
posted by gottabefunky at 10:02 AM on September 2, 2014


A few days ago I learned that this is what it looks like when a sewing needle is inside a dog's colon. It worked its way out without incident, and though I am several hundred dollars poorer, Josie is fine and I have some really cool pictures to put on the Christmas cards.
posted by cmyk at 10:28 AM on September 7, 2014


« Older Eat Like A Robber Baron.   |   Do you ever dream of starting again in a new skin? Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments