If your dog eats life threatening crap come hither

[DishingOutDone]

I started a thread on Saturday and no one wanted to talk to me! But the issue is still going on so I thought I'd expand a bit. (link to original: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/the_doghouse/3721482-Dog-eaten-a-piece-of-a-plastic-yoghurt-pot-decisions)

So the dog - 3 year old cockerpoo ate a bit of hard sharp plastic, he has a lot of form for eating crap. At the weekend the vet took X-ray (using weights to hold him still!!) said she thought she saw something but not enough evidence to either repeat x-ray or do ultrasound (both of which would need to be done under anaethestic). She said if he gets worse they can do the ultrasound, but at the moment he is simply not quite right, and was sick again this morning (first time since Saturday).

I've been thinking of all the other times he's eaten stuff like this, which I never see coming out in his poo and its making me think what IS in his stomach? You see those terrible pictures of sea birds and whales with stomachs full of plastic - I can remember a dozen times when we think he's had something like part of a plastic bottle top etc., over the 3 years. I also remembered last week before the plastic he chewed a hole in his blanket and ate the resulting circle of fabric.

Our last dog died aged 5 after exploratory surgery (not due to eating rubbish) so we are on hyper alert thinking could it happen again. I've booked him in with the vet I like for Friday but the way its going I reckon we might have to take him in earlier. (poo is normal just the occasional vomiting since we saw him eat the plastic)

What experiences have other dog owners had?

I've told this before but who cares! Our dog ate a sock and 27p in loose change on a walk so he had to go to the vet to get them removed.

I’ve got a cocker spaniel who will eat anything. I’m forever running after him and sticking my fingers in his gob to retrieve stuff.

He had half a sock hanging out his bum on the park the other day

He did need surgery to remove a corn on the cob husk that he had swollowed whole and had blocked his intestines. I thought he had a sickness bug until I saw him struggling to poo and rushed him in to vets.

How’s he doing now OP?

Wow. There's some corkers on here!! So many dogs living to tell the tale and eat crap again!

He's just very quiet. So maybe it isn't a blockage but you know the plastic he ate was small, say the size of a fingernail, I wonder if that's made it worse as its "hidden"? But you know he could have eaten anything any time and we wouldn't have known, so we're just guessing. We just have to wait and see. He's been put on hypo allergenic food which he was ok with for 2 meals now he's not eating it!

There’s a golf ball theme in these parts.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7599899.stm

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-48689957

I have a 1yo who was not at all chewey as a puppy but around 9mo started eating everything. He had endless emergency vet visits and a stomach operation. The vets kept saying it was behavioural and I had to push a lot for other exams. When he finally had an endoscopy it turns out he has Crohn’s disease (IBS in dogs), which is currently controlled with steroids and diet. As long as he is medicated he doesn’t eat anything, so maybe something to consider with your dog.

I would be worried that the plastic has perforated something and I'm sorry but I'd be opting for surgery sooner rather than later. Plastic wont show on an x-ray, gas will but only if blocked. The US shows inflammation where? Is he at least on antibiotics? This doesn't sit right with me.

And to the pp who's puppy eats stones? Just no

Thats interesting Booboostwo; I think it would be a massive coincidence if he had become ill on the day after he ate the plastic, but not related to it.

So today he is much better, he picked up yesterday evening - he's on the special food dry version mixed with white fish. He fell on it after having the tinned stuff yesterday morning, I think that caused the diahorrea its basically tough fish paste and that's how it came out too!! I am quietly optimistic, lets take it one day at a time.

@TheoriginalLEM; that's what we thought - its why we took him to the vets in the first place, I know that once something like that is in the intestine it can cause a perforation and that can be fatal. The vets seemed very thorough. Surgery would be the very last option

The fact he has perked up is a good sign. When my cocker needed surgery he was so lethergic and really not well in himself at all.

Thank you @GingerFox - its been quite gradual and as he improved I could confirm in my own mind just how unhappy he'd been previously. He's normally in my face 18 hours a day; if he's not have a very light nap he's barking back and front, chewing the house up and demanding attention. Since being ill he's mostly slept and looked baleful. Its when he wants to get at the postman I know he feels a bit better.

oh and i was putting the washing in the utility room today and he snuck in and ate something off the floor. Didn't have my glasses on so no idea, but I presume it was something very tiny. He was so pleased with himself. The freezer is in there too so I think it might have been a frozen pea

Mine had to have emergency surgery when he was totally blocked. Was mainly pine cones and some plastic wrapping materials. I had to take him out muzzled for a couple of years when he was at his worst for eating anything. Also met another muzzled lab who had the same surgery after eating eight corn on the cobs at a barbecue complete with the little forks that you fit in each end to eat them with.

Jesus H @wendywoopywoo222 - cant believe that other lab recovered

I think I'd have to muzzle mine all day, he only eats stuff in the house.

My dog is the same. Sticks, stones, soil, blankets, plastic, toys, paper, cardboard, food bowls. She uses her front teeth to tear things apart so thankfully the majority of the time the pieces are very small. But anything that takes her fancy she will go for. She's not allowed upstairs as it makes it easier to keep things out of her reach if she is only downstairs. She's not so bad on walks because we do a lot of focus work when out, and she is fantastic when focussed. But obviously can't do that with her constantly at home, although she has got much better as she has got older.

I actually work at a vets and I'm pretty sure my colleagues have running bets as to how long it will be before she needs surgery for foreign body removal. She's already been made to be sick once when a little puppy for sock ingestion. She didn't even bother chewing that one, down in one

Googling focus work. Sounds good, but I can't imagine my dog ever wanting to focus on me! Does it generally work with all dogs? When i did puppy training with him they taught "watch me" whereby the dog would look at your face, but my dog would then think yeah thank god that's over, I looked at her, now what ....!!

No idea if it works with all dogs, I think it only works with my dog because it means she gets treats and she's a greedy bugger! That's what she does when walking on the lead, she looks up to me at regular intervals and I regularly get her to stop and start and switch sides. All simple little things, but just to make sure she is paying attention. I still have to constantly watch her though, no such thing as a relaxing walk in this house

When I was very young, my parents GSD had to have a major operation (this was round about 1980 or so) to remove an entire ball of wool from his stomach. God alone knows how, or even why he felt the need to eat it, but... other than the surgical wound and resulting scar, he was fine. The vet apparently offered the still wound ball back to my parents (who said "thanks, but no thanks!").

My 13 year old Springer is a nightmare for eating things he shouldn't. Particularly from my daughter's room - he's especially fond of unused, still in their wrapper, sanitary towels, so we have to make sure they're in a drawer he can't open (I think he likes the floral scent of them, quite frankly). At the moment he's totally off his food, and I'm trying to work out how to get the floral scent of the towel wrappers onto his specially prepared meals in an effort to tempt him (and, to be honest, I'm only half-joking: he's my 14 year old son's best friend, and it's his birthday on Monday, so I'd really rather said dog improves before then. I do have a suspicion, though, that this time he won't )

When I was my son's age, I had a GSD/Lab cross whose stomach must have been made of cast iron! He ate socks, hair scrunchies (he'd literally steal them out of my hair by lying on the chair behind me, waiting until I was engrossed in a book or the TV, then help himself - my parents used to watch him do it, and they always passed through whole after a day or so...).

My other dog, now, though, is prone to knickers. Specifically my 23 year old daughter's nylon lace thongs. The lacier, the better. She doesn't eat them, though - she delicately nibbles one half of the leg bit away, then hides them under her cushion in my room or, even better, under the dirty washing pile where she also stashes her collection of bones. My daughter didn't believe me when I said it was the pup and not the washing machine ripping her (expensive) undies apart, until she caught her mid-nibble one night. I think the dog likes the nylon scratchy lace and uses it to floss with, because her teeth are pretty much see-in-the-dark white...

I'd like to say that they grow out of it, but once they get into the habit of it, and work out that there's attention attached - even if it's bad attention of their owners shouting/crying/begging to know why they do it - they carry on. They're slightly like permanent toddlers in that respect (both of mine used to eat weird things, too!).

Luckily my DDogs have never been like this (all rescue mutts) but my dad's side of the family all have golden retrievers and they've had some shockers - out of a series of about 8 between them all, most have eaten all sorts of rubbish and two have died - one from eating a foil balloon in a field on a walk, one from eating a whole cling-film wrapped banana loaf that was in an esky under a bag of ice in the boot of a car (dog was not in the car, somehow managed to jump into boot long enough to get it while the car was being unloaded). Really sad but in those two cases they genuinely seemed to have a screw loose - completely untrainable in various ways, the others were all very well trained. And these all came from registered AKC breeders.