Dogs will eat anything. Anything. Trash, wood, plastic, rotten food, rubber, bones, the list is as endless as a dog’s curiosity. We’ve learned this over the years because our hounds have on several occasions snacked upon that which they shouldn’t. A quick call to the animal emergency clinic gets us the correct dose of hydrogen peroxide for a dog’s weight and then we go out back to induce vomiting. I’ve done it several times.
The first time was shortly after we got our first dog, Zephyr. We learned she was a trash eater when she treated herself to a pound of rancid bacon and whatever else she found in the trash on a day that we did some ‘fridge cleaning. I called animal emergency and they provided me with the recipe for stomach cleaners, also known as hydrogen peroxide shots. I was instructed to give her a tablespoon every five minutes until she threw up.
Out we went to the driveway and commenced. It was nearly half an hour and much H2O2 later before she finally started. This was, of course, right when the neighbor came staggering over to meet the new dog who was now wobbling uncertainly and foaming at the mouth with long bubbly tendrils of bile dripping onto the soggy pile of half-digested bacon in front of her.
Meet my new dog.
The neighbor smiled and said in his permanently drunken twang, “She’s brindle. She’s beautiful.”
Zephyr, a trash hound if ever there was one, got pretty familiar with H2O2 over the years. When we got Daphne it sometimes became more difficult since we didn’t always know who the guilty party was, but we found that Daphne threw up much more quickly than Zephyr so while Zephyr might be hiding in a corner of the yard with her nose jammed under the fence, Daphne might hurl, thus revealing the evidence of the crime and sparing Zephyr another tablespoon of that most insidious poison.
As might be guessed, Phoebe entered the club last night. We came home from the Willie Nelson show to find that she’d eaten a rubberized nylabone. A call to animal emergency told me I would be inducing vomiting.
Despite being the biggest dog we’ve ever had, she’s a true lightweight when it comes to doing H2O2 shots. She asked if she could have it with some grenadine – an H2O2 sunrise – or even on the rocks, but I pointed out that real dogs do their shots straight up. Without salt, lime, or grenadine she took it like a trooper.
She hacked after the first one and then immediately after the second, she threw up, expelling the rubber scraps of her evening adventures. She went to bed singing, “Hydrogen peroxide river don’t run dry, you’re all I got to take care of me.” while I wondered why these things only ever happen in the middle of the night.
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