Dogs, the great garbage disposal

by Dr. V | Thursday | June 23, 2011 | 40 comments

I couldn’t even get through this whole article without getting the willies. Dogs eating cicadas until they got sick. Eww. Given Brody’s proclivities for partially ingested rodent bits and rotting seaweed, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still manage to be impressed by the gross things our pets decide seem good enough to eat.

A fellow vet once commented, shortly after I posted about Brody’s strange love of earplugs, that he would be having his first foreign body removal before he was one. I am proud to say that here at two, he has yet to create a surgical situation. He still loves earplugs, but for the most part whenever he destroys something he chews it up and then spits it back out. Thank goodness.

Others are not so lucky. I had a client whose poodle loved rocks. Not gravel, mind you, golf-ball sized rocks. After his first surgery at 10 months, they vowed to do a better job monitoring him in the yard. After his second surgery at 18 months, they re-landscaped the yard.

Probably my own worst experience came when my daughter was about a year old. Emmett was still working though his jealousy issues. The nanny was home with the kids, and apparently left a dirty diaper on the changing table, which Emmett promptly ate, contents and all. An hour later, he threw it all back up, all over my couch. ALL OVER the couch.

Of course, I came home about 10 minutes into the debacle, the nanny standing there over the carnage, paralyzed with horror. “I have no idea what he ate,” she said, “and I have no idea what to do.” Translation: you don’t pay me enough to deal with this mess, lady.

Honestly, one whiff and it was pretty obvious what he ate, but given the extent of the situation, I think she was just in shock. I sent her home, looked in vain for a Hazmat suit, and ended up just throwing the entire set of cushions into the backyard to be hosed off until I could call in a professional cleaner. That was a fiasco. Think “Exorcist” level nasty, that one.

Gross, but not unique. I’ve heard of coin rolls, knives, and Power Rangers digested in toto by dogs lacking any discrimination. What’s the worst your pet has eaten?

Filed: Daily Life, Dogs, Health

wikith

My roommate’s dog once decimated her bathroom trashcan. She took it in to induce vomiting, he threw up a little bit of kleenex and Q-tips, problem solved, neh?

He came home and promptly jumped on her bed and threw up the used maxi pad he’d also consumed. Soooo gross, ahahahaha! Almost enough revenge for all the times he pooped outside my bedroom door.
http://www.kusine.com Jessica

Cordy, when younger would chew on rocks, but we have no evidence she swallowed them. She chipped a tooth down to the nerve and it had to be removed, though.

Her newest trick is eating the bandage off her lick granuloma (while still wearing the cone of shame). Luckily she throws them back up after a few days. Now we’re trying the cone w/o the bandage and that seems to make her a little happier. She just hates those bandages!

http://www.kusine.com Jessica

Oh, and paper! Cordy will eat any paper that’s available. The worst was an entire roll of toilet paper and half a library book in the same day.

We have become very good about putting paper things away.

Ryl Ashley

This is not very original, but my mom made me laugh so hard I cried when she told me about how the dog she had when she was pregnant with me ate a dinner guest’s socks. It was time to go home and he couldn’t find his socks. Hey, where are my SOCKS? And then the dog threw them up – partially digested but entire and very recognizable. I absolutely love the guy who was the owner of the socks in question, I really do, but it served him absolutely right. You should never get so comfortable at *anyone* else’s house that you go over for dinner and take your SOCKS off!!

Leigh

LOL!!!

Tonya

Clyde loves to eat cicadas! So disgusting! He also chews up sticks he finds in the yard. But like Brody, he doesn’t swallow them. He just chews them up and spits them back out. We always say we’ll never need to rent a chipper because Clyde does that for us. He makes his own mulch!
Lisa W

Love the socks story! Oscar has ingested a rock or two, but luckily has thrown them back up — and it’s been a while. My big one was Bailey…. Not too long after Jeff and I started dating (Bailey was 7), she decided she had separation anxiety. I tried the leaving for a little while and coming right back, the room pheromone thing, and everything else I could think of. Finally, the vet recommended that I put her in the (sizable) master bathroom when we had to leave her. My mom and dad lived nearby, so we tried to take her over there if we were going to be gone for any length of time. We also took her there for “day care at Grandma’s house.”

Well, one Sunday night I had severe stomach pain and Jeff thought I might have appendicitis, so off we went to the ER. He didn’t want to take the time to take Bailey to the grandparents, thinking we’d be home before too long (ha!). 8 hours later we get home. On Wednesday, my dad mentioned that Bailey hadn’t pooped all day, and when I woke up on Thursday she was throwing up. Come to find out, she had raided the laundry while we were at the hospital, and $2500 in surgery later, the final count was 7 pair of underwear and an entire pair of tights. And the tights weren’t in pieces, either. I’ll never figure out how she did that…

Ryl Ashley

OK, I know I shouldn’t be laughing at this! OMG!! LMAO!!

http://www.briarcliffanimal.com/blog Mary

We’ve seen dogs who have eaten rocks, pantyhose (whole), and tampons. But I’d say the weirdest I’ve seen was when my *cat* chewed both of the straps off of my nightgown and swallowed those, whole. Luckily we found it strapless pretty soon after he’d done it, so I took him in and they used the endoscope to remove them. I guess his after his neuter and leg amputation he decided he likes propofol a little too much….
http://artbakelove.blogspot.com/ Allison

My dog 10lb dog Mimi ate an entire drawing eraser (1.5×1 inch) no chewing, nothing. We were in disbelief and searched the couch for hours convinced she could not have swallowed it. Emergency surgery at UC Davis Vet Hospital and a giant bill later, we believed it.

My other dog Huey is just 5lb. An old (irresponsible) roommate made a chimichanga and left it on the couch to go get a glass of water. She came back to an empty plate. Yep, he scarfed down the entire thing (almost as long as him!) in minutes. I took him outside convinced he would explode out one end or the other. Hours later… nothing. Next day, normal poop. He’s got an insane iron stomach!
http://marriedwithdawgs.blogspot.com Sarah

My Sadie once ate my pastry cloth and roller cover. When it came out the other end, I thought it was rope. Had to cut it out of her bum as she passed it (pulling is a big no-no!). That was pretty gross.

My Maggie once ate a book I had just got called “How Dogs Think”. To this day, it’s the one and only book she has destroyed and we have 3 full bookcases throughout our house. I think she was trying to tell me something.

And then there was Kaiser, my husband’s dog previous to our relationship. Kaiser-buddy was apparently a mischievous dog. On his list of “why on earth would you eat that”? A mattress and a package of mach3 razor blades.

http://texaslawchick.livejournal.com ‘stina

Holden ate the The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of New Skete when he was a youngster. A few years later, he threw up all over Catcher in the Rye, the book from which his name came.

Keely

We keep our dog Harriet crated while we’re out of the house because of what she’s tried to eat… For example, somehow she ate the handle of a steak knife she took off of the kitchen counter (amazingly enough, all without cutting herself). Another time, I found her chewing on a pincushion full of pins- she was okay then too, although she was licking her chops for the next few hours. We thought maybe she’d grow out of it, but at 8+ years now, she’s still as much of a puppy as ever.
http://www.pawcurious.com Sheila

Miss Madee will eat anything & everything … rabbits, young & old; rags; a bag of chocolate macaroons; rotting fish; very old bird parts; skeletal remains of something; all food items regardless; has a fondness for fruit, once ate two plums, a nectarine, a banana with skin, a clementine & was caught with a grapefruit in her mouth. She did spit out the pits! Then there was the entire roast incident … it was raw and I managed to get it away from her while she was attempting to gulp it down whole. So many more things … I call her my chocolate lab garbage disposal unit! So far no adverse affects … well except the bar of soap & the bag of peanuts. That was rather ugly …
Megan

Ruth (dog in my avitar) decided that the night before a big pathology test in vet school was the night to eat a poisonous mushroom in the back yard. She suffered some pretty serious consequences, and I had to attempt to study, a nervous wreck, in the break room at school, feet away from the ICU where she was being treated. She pulled through just fine, and still continues to snarf up stuff she shouldn’t from the floor from time to time.
Jacki

Mine is weird too. I had a siamese cat that liked to drink out of the soap dish. One night my roommate had a friend over and she rinsed out the soapdish to soak her contacts. In the morningg the soapdish was empty and we never found her contacts!
Susan

The funniest was a neighbor’s yellow lab. He would steal your lunch! The entire bag or lunch box never to be seen again! He also stole an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies, zip-lock bag and all. He was one pudgy lab! Not being our dog, I have no idea if he ever had any ill effects. I’m guessing it was never serious since he’d always come back for more!
Jamie

Akira, when she was younger than a year old, ate TWO of her collars. She is crate trained, so I guess she was bored in there, during the day. She somehow got her collar OFF, then chewed AROUND the metal pieces and tags, and ate the rest of the collar… IN ONE PIECE. And not only did she do this ONCE, she did this TWICE. Needless to say, she doesn’t wear a collar in the crate anymore, and she is about to turn 3, lol. Thankfully, they both seemed to pass on their own, no surgery needed, but she had me quite worried for a few days.

Our new pup Yoshi, likes to get in to things… dryer sheets and the cat litter box!. (he even jumps over the baby gate to get to the stupid thing! sigh!) But I do not think he has ingested anything worse than some toy fluff, when he breaks a toy open… but has then just puked that back up. So fingers crossed, Akira’s collars were the worst for us!
Michelle

My brothers Golden ate their drywall when she was a puppy, twice! My Golden eats anything paper, but she’s gotten good about bringing it to me if I see her with it. My lab/mastiff mix puppy has eaten a dead rat (the vet laughed and laughed over this when I brought him in to induce vomiting, they still chuckled about it). He has also eaten several of my son’s Nerf guns, wooden planks from the playground, and the waistband on a pair of my husbands best work pants. We are just waiting for the massive surgery to happen with him.
http://thegirlblogger.com Adri

I dog-sit for some family friends, who I also work for… After their dog rooted through my dirty laundry and ate a pair of undies (unbeknownst to me) he passed them in their yard after they returned from their trip. Once they took a stick to poke at his poop and realized what he had passed they couldn’t help but laugh. The next day at work I was teased incessantly about my choice of undergarments (all in fun of course) I just calmly told them it was probably good that it was a thong and not a pair of granny panties! Still… poor dog’s tummy!
http://texaslawchick.livejournal.com ‘stina

I speak not of my own dog, but of my sister’s Holden. A Black Labrador Retriever.
At three months, he ate a sandwich wrapped in cellophane that he found on the street. When advised to give him hydrogen peroxide to get him to throw up, my sister found that he LIKED it.

Probably a dead squirrel about fifteen months later.

A bone. Which turned out not to need surgery.

A pair of underwear that ultimately had to be surgically removed. I call it his thongectomy. I do note that Holden has probably in his lifetime eaten close to a hundred pair of underwear. It was only this pair that caused trouble.

A corncob (it passed).

(Possibly) an ant bait traps. The vet’s suggestion was to FEED HIM AS MUCH AS HE COULD EAT. Never had Holden ever been so happy.

He once broke into the pantry and ate most of a 10 pound bag of dog food.

He once broke into the kitchen ate (and this is quite possibly the most disgusting combination of foods he’s ever eaten) three pounds of cornmeal, two pounds of chocolate and a box of raisins. (I have been told that the end result was “explosive”.)

He ate nine pounds of asparagus before my mom’s annual Christmas Party one year. He ate an entire wheel of brie at another year’s.

He’s eaten more whole loaves of bread than I can count.

He dug up and ate one of my mother’s roses. He ate a set of rental car keys that my brother was using. He ate a couple of my dad’s antique duck decoys (this, given Holden’s training, shouldn’t have been surprising). He ate an antique quilt.

My sister says, though, that the bag of shrimp heads was the worst thing he ever ate.

I think that Holden went to the vet, or at least had an over the phone consult, because of something he ate every year of his life. Surprisingly, he died of pneumonia after several surgeries for mast cell cancer at the age of 12 1/2. I suggested they donate the stomach to science.
Beccity

I have 5 cats.

Amy: Dryer sheets
Sugar: Plastic bags (More like chewing on or nibbling, but still.)
Spice: The broom bristles
Loki: Wool balls, or loose fur. I actually caught him pawing at some furniture SPECIFICALLY to ball up some fur so he could eat it. He also knocked over my craft drawers to get at a wool polishing drill bit.
Luna:Nothing really out of the ordinary.

Food Items they love: Only Sugar seems to be willing to try people food. She LOVES the center of a french roll, and comes running when she hears the package of dried seaweed being opened. She also gets to lick the lid to my breakfast shake every day. I also fostered a kitten who thought if I was eating, I should share with her. So one day I’m eating kimchee (A hot pickled napa cabbage) and she started begging for some, so I showed her some on my fork. She sniffed it suspiciously, gave it a lick, then shook her head and started batting at my fork like it had attacked her!
Karen

Toby chewed a little round foot a little bigger than a golf ball, that was attatched just by some rope, off one of his toys….we threw that toy away when we found the pile of vomit w/ the foot he had swallowed whole….lol.
Keighter

My family has 2 eaters. Buzz and Lupin, a husky and dachshund respectively.
Buzz has had 3 intestinal blockage surgeries for: a corn cob, the fingers of a leather glove (all 4), and a portion of a leash. He only ate the fingers of the glove which still baffles me. Then he moved away from cloth goods and I’m pretty sure that he decided those other things were too mundane and ANY dog could eat them.
Then he and his partner in crime Spunky ate 10 FULL sides of smoked salmon, (Spunky tends to stay out of things but this was too tempting) They had the WORST gas ever. We got on ladders to see if a squirrel had gotten into the house and died in the living room lighting fixtures. Guess why the stench kept moving? Because they were following us around…

His greatest accomplishment? He ate a 10 lbs of flour. Well probably more like 3lbs of flour the rest he decided to use for a White Christmas set in the kitchen. Those didn’t settle well with him.

Then there is Lupin, who has eaten the weirdest thing I can imagine ANY creature eating. 2 four ounce tubes of oil paint, metal tube and all. The only thing left were the plastic caps. He promptly threw it all back up, but it was very lovely artwork in the yard until I cleaned it up.

Then he ate 11 doughnuts, which I were longer and wider than him at the time. Idiot creatures.

Then the WORST WORST, is other dog, that they dug up. But I shan’t go into that particular story. Because it’s very, very gross.

http://texaslawchick.livejournal.com ‘stina

The donut! Holden once ate part of a fairly valuable art piece that contained a desiccated and shellacked donut.

Sassy

Over the years, my various dogs have made a habit of eating things they shouldn’t. My son’s dog just chewed on the drywall outside the bathroom while my son was in the shower (I guess he was lonely!), and did the same to the wall outside his bedroom. Our border collie took a pair of glasses off the couch and destroyed them, then threw them up. Our schnauzer will eat anything, including fresh jalapeno peppers, though they come back up (my husband still likes to give them to him, but won’t clean it up!).

Then there are the stories from the vet clinic. A client brought in a stool sample, asking what the dog had eaten – turned out to be the string net that was around a pork roast – the client said she’d wondered where that disappeared to! A pug that we removed $1.78 in change from the stomach, along with nuts, bolts, and at least a dozen guitar picks. As the doc removed the various coins, I joked that perhaps she would pay for the surgery herself (unfortunately, she died of zinc poisoning from the pennies she’d chewed).

My sons have done their part too. I remember driving down the road, and hearing a little voice from the back seat saying “Is it bad if you swallow a nickel?”. Instead of our intended destination, we went to the ER.
Racahel

My dog loves to eat horse poop and hoof trimmings, but any dog around horses loves that although it is just disgusting. He’ll used to eat rose bushes which gave him hives. And he loved the expensive leather stuff we used for the horses, riding boots, saddle straps, etc. Stories I have heard are dogs eating retainers off nightstands, diamond rings, coins, and recently we removed a few pairs of thongs (underwear) from a dachshund at work!
http://www.briarcliffanimal.com/blog Mary

We also had a pet chicken who ate her owner’s heirloom pearl earring. We found it in her wattle on x-ray. I don’t know how that story ended, though I wish I did.
KellyK

Well, she didn’t eat it so much as just chew it up, but the top of my list has to be a red Sharpie marker. On a beige carpet. Yeah…
Georgie

My wire fox terrier rollled in the dirty diaper a friend put aside in the yard. The neighbor was distracted and then we saw the dog…roll in the dirty diaper and try to eat it. This was the same dog that a few years later was jealous of my boyfriend and would feign adoration by sitting at his feet….and farting stinkies that could probably have peeled wallpaper.
LB

My dog ate part of a $20 bill. I say part, because I caught her doing it and was able to salvage enough to use the money still. I never left money out after that and I still have no idea why she did it. She wasn’t a puppy at the time, so must have liked something on it.

There was a dog I used to watch that ate my bottle of lotion, a remote, and pretty much anything within her reach. Crazy dog! The owner had to keep EVERYTHING put away.
http://newfies1.blogspot.com/ Jen

So far the worst thing that Leroy has eaten is 2 AA batteries, that he chewed and had ulcer burns on his tongue. The silly bandz, pencils, marbels, and countless other objects left around by the kids have all been small enough to pass.
Lucky for me he seems to have outgrown this. (knock on wood)
http://thefosterdog.blogspot.com/ Michelle

One of my foster dogs, Keisha, would eat the most random things. We’d think we’d have everything edible safely tucked away but she’d always find something. A TV remote, a computer mouse, dog toothpaste (that she HATED when I tried to give it to her), a nalgene bottle, a glass (she didn’t exactly eat it but she knocked it off the table then picked up the big broken pieces and put them on the couch…?), antibacterial spray, a tube of polysporn, a brush handle. Just basically anything we thought was safe she would eat, but then she’d leave the normal dog things (socks, undies, shoes, garbage) alone.

One day we came home to a scene that I imagine a cocaine den might look like. There was white powder evvvverrywhere. My own dog was on amoxicillin for an infected rash and Keisha had taken every last pill and eaten the little red and yellow casings off them. What kind of dog actually WANTS to eat pills? Oh, and for dessert she ate the pill bottle too.
Tanya

Well.. besides the usual tampons and dirty kleenexes, my Dane X has eaten 2 cedar trees, a dog house (still don’t know how she missed all the nails), a Winners gift card, a gillette razor (again, she ate around the dangerous parts), the cord of a plugged in hair straightener (there were sparks coming out when I found her), a doggie christmas stocking, her halloween costume, play-doh (though i don’t think she swallowed any, and boy it was fun trying to scrape that stuff off her mouth and teeth) and GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE. She started eating the siding off the garage and then we clued in and built a dog run. This all happened in her first 2 years of life. Now she’s a doll, but I don’t think I’ll ever get another puppy. They’re that cute for a reason — so you don’t strangle them!

AND.. our other dog just about died a couple weeks ago because he got a rock stuck in his throat. Luckily, our wonderful vet was able to put him out and go down his throat and get it before it fell into his lungs — thank goodness because that would have been major surgery.

It’s a good thing they make me laugh so much!
Tanya

I also have a cat that hides in the back of my closet and eats the sequins off my formal wear. I once opened my closet door and I could see his yellow eyes glowing in the dark and hear him growling. I turned on the light and he was mauling my sequined purse! I just closed the closet door and left him alone.
Dusty

My dog ate an entire unopened can of chewing tobacco… Never found the can and she never had any issues.. THANKFULLY! But after that whenever my Ex would open a can to take a chew (yuck!) she was right there wanting more!!!
Julie

When Gilbert was a puppy, he chewed up orate tons of stuff – snails, books, magazines, soap (luckily it was homemade oatmeal soap!), a wicker basket, and flip flops. My brother’s cat Cooper at a souvenir flattened penny – that required surgery, so my bro got pet insurance in case it happened again. And it did, this time it was the rubber stopper off a spring door stop.
Lauren

Our male ridgeback ate a diaper cake while we were expecting. Can you say Vaseline sandwich?
k

My dog has a paper addiction. She usually just shreds it and leaves little piles, but she got a $1,000 trip to doggy emergency when she figured out how to step on the peddle of the bathroom trash to open it and ate a few used tampax. ewwwwww. Had to get a bigger one that she’s too little to get into.
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