The Dog With The Cast Iron Stomach

I’m sure most of you have suffered through the puppy phase where they will basically chew on anything that they can get their mouth around. Of course there are the typical favorites like shoes and the legs of kitchen stairs. Our Australian Shepherd, Mittsy wasn’t much different in the early days. This chewing phase lasted about 8 months.

After that we could be certain that our furniture was safe, but there was never a month that would go by without Mittsy testing something new to see if it was edible. Thank goodness for pet gates, or we probably wouldn’t have much left of our house and home.

You know how there are exceptions to every rule right? Well Mittsy’s cullinary plan seemed to defy every rule written about dangerous items for dogs to ingest.

We were terrified for her the first time this happened, and it has happened several times since then. On her first Easter weekend with us, she managed to find our children’s cache of left over chocolate Easter eggs. Mittsy devoured as many as she could, wrapper and all.

The stomach pains she would experience would last about a day and then she would be back on the hunt to see if there was anymore of this glorious food to be found.

With Easter out of the way Mittsy needed something more along the lines of a regularly available gourmet meal. With a house full of teen-aged girls there was always one tasty treat that Mittsy could always easily get her paws on. Who would have believed that lipstick would become a favorite.

Have you ever tried to remove red lipstick from a beige carpet. Well in our house it happened so frequently that we became experts at it. The household pet gate never seemed to be enough of a deterent, because our daughters would leave their lipstick all over the house. Easy pickings for Mittsy.

Our biggest surprise however, was yet to come.

Once a year, friends of ours host a long weekend get together at their summer cottage. Several families are invited and pets are included. Its a favorite weekend for our family and we look forward to it as soon as Spring arrives.

The majority of this infamous weekend was absolutely fabulous. Unfortunately, on the day we were to leave for home, Mittsy decided that she would need lots of food to tide her over on the four hour trip home. She searched high and low looking for any kind of eats she could find.

The first course was a rare find for Mittsy, a full French loaf. The tradition for the weekend was always to have the departing meal to be an Italian feast. One of the families had brought the french loaf and had left it sitting on their bedroom night table. Unfortunately Mittsy was now ready for the entree.

We had been out playing around and in the water, and I was sent to find a frisbee that was in the cottage. Unfortunately I found more than just the frisbee. Out the back window of the cottage, my eye caught some movement. There was Mittsy filling herself on the gourmet treasures in the cottage compost heap.

I managed to chase her away from her compost delight, but within half an hour or so, Mittsy became very ill. Every breath from her mouth was steaming in the air, even though it was a 90 degree day.

As I mentioned earlier, this cottage was quite remote. The nearest vet was hours away. I had already packed up the car earlier that day, so we gathered up the kids, said goodbye to our hosts and headed for civilization.

She was sick at least a half dozen times before we got home. It was the most unpleasant trip our family has ever experienced.

I guess she did a good job purging herself, because by the time we got home, Mittsy was raring to go and was running around our yard looking for something to play with, or eat.

We watched her closely, made sure she had lots of fresh water to drink and marveled at the dog with the iron gut. It was like she was saying to us “I told you I could eat anything”.