Our little story here is not as interesting as the story another wrote about the Basenji that ate the sex toy, but it is still bizarre.
Roo is not normally destructive. We keep plenty of toys around to keep him busy. When he was a puppy he would occassionally get into the corner of a card board box. Roo had one particular shoe box he went after regularly, so we sprayed that completely with bitter apple and left it out intentionally. This appeared to break him from that habit.
Roo is now year old and has recently been neutered. We have been attempting to keep him calm without using the sedative the Vet gave us when we took him home.
On Monday, 3 days into his recovery, we had to run some errands. Instead of taking him with us in the car, we put him in the bathroom that his Food, Kennel,and toys are in. We closed the baby gate across the doorway and got in the car and left. We returned about 1 1/2 hours later and discovered that Roo had eaten his 3/4 inch wide, Red, Martingale Collar. We do not mean he chewed it up, we mean he consumed all of it except for his rabies tag and the metal parts which he was chasing around the bathroom floor when we came in. There was a scrap of the nylon the collar is made out of attached to the metal pieces that were left. How he got this collar off his neck we will never know? The only thing we can figure is that maybe the Vet has loosened it to get it off his neck when we took him in for his neuter.
I contacted Tanza who has always been helpful, and she suggested that we could wait or give Roo a little Hydrogen Peroxide to make him Vomit. We think that what Tanza suggested is very good to know for anyone in similar situation. Needless to say, we elected to wait because we were concerned about Roo busting out his stitches from his 3 day old neuter procedure.
Now this is not the weird part. We know from some of the other stories in this forum that Basenji's eat a lot of strange things including sex toys, laundry, and wedding cake.
Since Miranda and I were very concerned about blockage we were watching Roo's stools very closely. All appeared to be normal so we thought maybe his digestive system had broken down the collar he ate, or he had chewed it up so small we did not notice, or that it just had not passed through yet.
The really strange part of this is that 1 1/2 days later, after eating, drinking, and pooping normally, I woke up to find 2 large pieces of the Red Nylon Collar on the floor in our bedroom. They were wet and about 2 inches or more long. I started scratching my head, and immediately called Miranda at work. I asked her if there was any where she might have missed when she was looking for the collar or that Roo might have hidden them. She assured me this was not possible. Several hours later I discovered where Roo had hidden the collar when I witnessed Roo throwing up 3 more large pieces of Red material that used to be his collar. I called Miranda at work again, and told her what was going on and she directed me to our refrigerator where she hung the Heimlich and CPR instructions for dogs and told me to watch him closely for distress. There was no distress. In fact you would not even know this dog had thrown up anything or had even been neutered a few days earlier.
When Miranda came home, I suggested that we put all the pieces together and measure them to get an idea if there was more to come. We believe that we have finally recovered his collar except in several large pieces. We are looking into purchasing a Lupine Martingale now just because it has a lifetime warranty. Of course we do not know if a recovered collar from the digestive system of a dog is excluded from that warranty.
We still do not understand how Roo managed to do this or where it actually was for 1 1/2 days. We find it even more amazing that it came back out the end it went in.
We are looking into classes for Roo to take in regard to Sword Swallowing!
Jason and Miranda
See, if you owned a typical breed what ever would you have to talk about over dinner?
