While looking online for the best puppy food out there I came across this post on Quora that blew my mind. Now I am known for getting side tracked often but I know my dog Rosie is always getting into something she shouldn’t be so I thought I should read this…then I knew it needed to be shared. I never would have thought of a dog eating this though…
Here is their story: Rai Khalsa – Updated September 20, 2018
As A Veterinarian, What Is The Oddest Case A Pet Owner Has Brought To You?
After 40 years in veterinary practice, “the most” is difficult to choose, but this might be it. I had an owner present a goofy 60 pound pit bull for vomiting. Dog felt fine but couldn’t keep any food down. The owner wasn’t particularly alarmed, the dog was in no distress, so I initially just treated him for gastritis – etiology unknown. Dogs routinely eat stupid stuff, get pukey for a day or two, and then make full recoveries. Assumed this pup would do the same. He didn’t.
The owner brought him back a couple of days later, still vomiting, now not even able to keep water down, so I suggested we hospitalize the pup and start a G.I. work-up – just some routine lab work and abdominal x-rays. The owner balked, so I reluctantly tweaked his medical treatment, with the somewhat passionate warning that we would have no choice but to proceed with the work-up if he didn’t bounce back very soon.
Two days later, he showed up again. Dog still feeling OK – not great, but OK. Not bouncing around the exam room, but still alert and wagging his tail. Still hadn’t been able to keep any food down. Owner finally agreed to medical work-up. The dog’s blood work was all normal, but there was clearly something in his stomach on x-ray, when it should have been quite empty since he hadn’t eaten anything for so long. A dog’s stomach is typically tucked pretty high up under his ribcage, so it’s tough to palpate foreign bodies that have not yet entered the small intestines. The next step for this guy was exploratory surgery, assuming there was likely a gastric foreign body of some sort, blocking the outflow of ingesta from the stomach into the duodenum.
The dog was prepped for surgery and fully anesthetized. Before even making the initial incision into his belly, with him lying on his back stretched out on the surgery table, it was clear that something was very “off.” When I incised into his abdomen and felt his stomach, it was maximally distended and peculiarly firm. I incised into the stomach wall very carefully, having absolutely no idea what I might find – thinking some terrible tumor might have grown in this poor guy’s stomach and was completely filling it, so no food could stay down or get out. That made no sense though, because the dog was young and this was an acute onset. What I found when I actually got into the stomach made even less sense.
The stomach was absolutely full with a smooth round hard black sphere – it looked like he’d swallowed a bowling ball. Dogs swallow a lot of strange stuff and I’ve removed all manner of foreign material from the G.I. tracts of many dogs (mostly Labrador Retrievers), but there’s absolutely no way this dog’s esophagus could have accommodated this enormous object – and yet, there it was on the surgery table, surrounded by blue drapes, in front of my eyes. I was staring at the impossible. Continuously clueless about what the back story on this situation might have been, I dutifully extended my incision through the stomach wall large enough to remove the thing, inspected the gastric lining carefully, checked the rest of the G.I. tract and abdominal viscera for anything else out of the ordinary, detected nothing alarming, then closed the boy back up and called the owner to explain this most bizarre and truly inexplicable finding. It was then, and only then, that this owner revealed a piece of the medical history he’d omitted every time I’d questioned him during the days leading up to this point. Oh, by the way, the pup had been playing in his workshop and had chewed up and eaten a tube of Gorilla Glue the day the vomiting started. To this day, I’m not sure why he didn’t think that was an important part of the history, especially when asked repeatedly if the dog was in the habit of chewing on weird stuff. Nonetheless, I learned that day what Gorilla Glue is, and the dog made a full and uneventful recovery. Who knew there was a fixative in many an American home that will expand to maximally fill the space into which it’s placed – even if that space happens to be in the interior of a living organism?
So – I was fully prepared the next time an owner called about three years later, appropriately frantic because her dog (also a pit bull!) had just ingested a tube of Gorilla Glue. No problem, I assured her. Just get her in. She’s gonna need surgery to get it out, but she’ll be fine. I learned that day that newly ingested Gorilla Glue is tan and a bit crumbly, rather than black and hard like Gorilla Glue that’s been attacked by digestive juices for several days.
Lessons learned:
- Pit bull dogs seem to have an affinity for the taste of Gorilla Glue.
- Gorilla Glue will not pass uneventfully through the G.I. tract of a dog.
- And for you pet owners out there: it’s extremely important to tell your veterinarian EVERYTHING that might be pertinent when giving her the history on your sick pet.
Here are some photos of the second event – two images of the blob of Gorilla Glue right after removal and one x-ray of the dog’s stomach distended with blob of Gorilla Glue (still fluffy and air-filled) prior to surgery. This, by the way, is not what the film of the first dog’s stomach looked like, but that event was so long ago, I don’t have the film in digital form.
WOW is all I can say…so keep a eye on your little doggies when they go into your workshop 🙂
So BACK to my original post about what is the best puppy food out there?
, and I have been so amazed as to how many different kinds of vegetables dogs can have. And with the help of google, you can create so many different recipes for your dog! I wish I would have known about the benefits of this long ago but…can’t go back in time I can only move forward into a better future for my dogs.The Advisor’s top 14 best puppy foods for February 2021.
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