If you have similar issues with vomit, stop reading, because this will make you unhappy.
This winter, I took my kids into the library after school. My daughter’s school bag, a treasure trove of trinkets, trash, food, and hair clips, was left in the car along with our two dogs.
Upon returning, my little white dog, Tebby, looked up from an empty Nestle’s Semi-sweet Morsels bag, wagging her little nub tail, and sporting a chocolate mustache.
The bag had been nearly full, so considering she only weighed about 14 pounds, that meant my little dog ate 16% of her body weight in delicious milk chocolate.
I seemed to recall that chocolate was bad for dogs in more than a waistline way. I did a quick “chocolate & dogs” search on my phone. On the screen, I saw stories of death, descriptions of death, and time tables of death. Apparently, chocolate is the smack of the dog world, and Tebby had overdosed. If she didn’t throw up, she had a couple of hours to live - tops.
Next, I searched for vomiting recipes for dogs. Hey! What do you know! There’s a bunch of them! I picked an easy one, which involves hydrogen peroxide. I told the kids to sit tight, and I ran across the street to buy H2O2.
Brown bottle in hand, we went looking for a lovely spot to save the dog. The phone said I had less than an hour left before serious nerve damage started, so driving the 15 minutes home was totally out of the question. Riverside Park, though, was close and provided a beautiful backdrop for throwing up.
As we pulled in, I told the kids that making dogs puke requires teamwork. The kids were up to the task, so while I held the dog down and held her mouth up and open, one child poured hydrogen peroxide down her throat, while the other child supervised. Convinced that enough went down her gullet, I let her go. We watched her lick the now-foaming chocolate mustache, and look up at us as if we must have accidentally restrained her and poured nasty liquid down her throat.
Almost a minute passed before I declared, “It’s not working! Round TWO!” I grabbed her again and we poured another batch down her throat.
That time, when I let go of her, she clued in on the pattern and decided she was not interested in Round 3. She bolted toward the swing set, but only made it a few yards before the first heaving lurch.
For the next 30 minutes, we followed our poor little cockapoo around the park while she vomited up nearly a pound of Semi-Sweet Morsels (and a few unidentified things from my daughter’s school bag). The snow in a 100’ radius was splotched with foaming choco-barf.
On the way home, we all kept looking at Tebby, expecting her to either die or throw up again. I called the vet from the driveway. He told me we did the right thing, she would be fine, and the second dose of hydrogen peroxide was unnecessary. Unfortunately, Tebby heard the last part and didn’t speak to me for a few days.
I know she learned her lesson, because she asked for a real bunny to eat for Easter as opposed to a chocolate one.
I’m currently working on a hydrogen peroxide juice box for next Halloween to curb my children’s already startling sugar habit.
Good story. Our family used to have a small white & brown springer spaniel that I truly did not like. Of course, the feeling seemed to be mutual, for she always barked crazily at me whenever I came home. Not exactly a nice welcome, it always made me want to growl and bark back.
ReplyDeleteOne Easter eve, before the bunny arrived, Emi (the dog) found an as yet undelivered bag of Hershey's foil covered chocolate eggs in an upstairs closet and devoured them. Of course this was unbeknownst to any one in the household until the empty bag was discovered by aforementioned bunny. Unfortunately, at least as far as I was concerned, Emi did not die of chocolate poisoning, but rather left numerous small slimy piles of dark brown Easter truffles, adorned with tiny balls of shiny, multi colored aluminum foil, in many of the places the Easter Bunny might have chosen to leave the undigested treats.
Emi lived quite a few more years, and the Easter Bunny was warned not to leave stashes of his supplies anywhere low enough for future truffle hunting porcine canines to discover.