This dog willingly eats anything she can get her paws on. I discovered that aspect of her dog-anality (personality? get it? ha ha ha) early in our relationship. She was home for a week when I realized all trashcans needed tight lids. I've had to buy many new pairs of undies for my nieces because Trixie makes sushi out of them. No matter what the net vets say about chocolate, Trixie has never suffered any ill-effects from all the chocolate she's managed to steal from my stash.
But some of the stuff she eats is downright dangerous.
She loves shoes, summer sandals in particular. The first summer she was mine, I learned the hard way not to leave my sandals on the bedroom floor. They'd look fine until I'd pick them up and she'd neatly sliced the straps, separating them from the shoe. While this habit wasn't necessarily life threatening because of what she ingested, she was almost murdered because of it. When my sister splurged on very expensive leather sandals, she had them a week before Trixie chewed them up. I was furious!!! It cost me $130 to replace them. I was angry enough to throw them at her, chase her all over the house, and scream threats of killing her. Trixie continues to indulge in her strange shoe addiction. I hope she doesn't choke on a leather strap some day. And I'm sure she hopes I don't choke her with a leather strap some day!
Some of you may remember what it was like to fly overseas in the old days. Even in coach, liquor was unlimited and free. The liquor came in tiny plastic bottles. I rarely drank all that was offered, so I had a nice little collection of tiny bottles that I kept on a low shelf in my kitchen. After a long night of parent-teacher conferences, I came home to find my dog lolling on the living room floor surrounded by empty airline liquor bottles. She was stinkin' drunk. (She'd also removed the label from a wine bottle, but she couldn't figure out how to pop open the cork.) I was awake for much of the night putting her outside each time she appeared ready to ralph. Luckily, she did not die from alcohol poisoning.
One summer night I came home to find that she had gotten into my travel bag. She ate a chocolate flavored chapstick. She gnawed on the emery boards. She licked my blush. She even chewed my razor, but somehow managed to avoid slashing herself with the blade. However the worse thing she got into was the dental floss. People, dental floss is a danger to your pets! She didn't come to me when I walked in the door. She didn't surface when I called for her. Then I heard a terrible sound, and I found her lying behind the couch, choking on the dental floss she'd gobbled. I started pulling it out of her mouth, and it unraveled and unraveled and unraveled - much like a magician pulling scarves from a top hat. Her eyes were terrified, and I couldn't pull it out fast enough. Finally a bloody gooey glob of floss popped out of her throat and she could breathe again. I hate to think of what I would have discovered had I returned home a few hours later.
But the worse thing she ate, the absolutely worst thing, were the pain pills. She'd recently hurt her back and the vet prescribed pain medication. I'd given her one out of a bottle of ten. I came home from an exercise class to discover guilty Trixie and an empty bottle of pills. She'd chewed through the plastic bottle and taken a Marilyn Monroe overdose. I called the vet who told me to induce vomiting by feeding her peroxide. We went outside and she willingly swallowed the first dose. Nothing happened. I wrestled a second dose down her throat. Nothing again. I thought that maybe my peroxide was too old to be effective so I jumped in the car, sped to the drugstore, and administered a third dose from the new bottle. She fought me, but I got the stuff down her throat. Nothing. I called the vet and told her I was on my way. She tried to talk me into going to the emergency hospital, but there was no way in my state of mind that I could drive that far. Once at the vet's, they tried peroxide and it didn't work. So, they had to pump her stomach. Stomach pumping is dirty business. It involves charcoal and lots of vomit. (Now, I understood why they wanted me to take her elsewhere.) Everybody involved with my dog was covered in charcoal black puke by the time they were done. It was hard to see through the muck, but the vet found a few pills still relatively intact, so we were hopeful they hadn't had time to dissolve.
Another sleepless night. Another time my dog survived.
What's the moral of the story? I'm not sure if there is one. But this much I know. Cats are smart, and they need nine lives. Dogs are stupid, so I wonder how many lives they have? Trixie has gone through three or four. I hope she has a few more left because I have no hope she'll wise up when it comes to eating things that smell good. She's a lot like her mommy that way.
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