Wednesday, March 23, 2011

What Goes In, Must Come Out...

Upon returning home yesterday, I was greeted with a sight that was disturbing. My box of peppermint bark dark chocolate luna bars destroyed with empty wrappers strewn around. This was disturbing on two fronts. First, I love my luna protein bars and second (and most importantly) the perpetrator of the luna bar disaster was my lab, Ika. And so the late afternoon crazy began...

I wish I could say I handled the situation calmly, but sadly that isn't the case. Basically I went into a screaming rampage that Becca was the brunt of. Yes, I was really mad at myself for leaving the basement door slightly open and allowing Ika access to the bars in the first place. But as I don't always handle stress with the most finesse, letting off steam in a non productive way, was the route I chose to take. Am I proud, no. In a fury of rage and fear, I ran to get the table salt and pour it down Ika's throat in an attempt to induce vomiting. I knew this from a few months prior when he ate grapes that were inadvertently left on the kitchen table (and are also poison for dogs). Last time the salt worked right away, but this time no such luck. I began to panic more as I was not sure how much dark chocolate was in the bars exactly. All I know is that they taste yummy and have enough chocolate to satisfy my chocolate cravings, so my thought was they contained quite a bit.  Now Ika is a big dog (about 92 lbs- yet he could stand to lose 10 lbs) so it would take about 3 lbs of milk chocolate to do damage to him (yes I know this from past scary experiences and information from the vet), but this was dark chocolate which I know is much worse. Since the salt wasn't working, we raced for the hydrogen peroxide, another tool for inducing dog vomit.

By this time, Ika did not want anything put into his mouth, since he was sure it would be bad tasting. I grabbed the syringe and squirted the hydrogen peroxide down his throat. Oh, but I was out of time, because Bella had swimming and we couldn't miss it. I mean, she's already missing two lessons due to vacation and I paid a lot, so it was off to swimming with Harry and Becca in charge. Not my proudest moment...

Long story short. Ika vomited shortly after I left. Bad news is the kids forgot to watch him after and he being the dumb dog that he is, went back and ate it all back up. I guess it still had a chocolate flavor...The best news of all is I found out that although tasty, peppermint bark luna bars don't really contain a lot of dark chocolate. At least not enough to slow Ika down.

So Ika lives another day to cause chaos in my world...

PS. I really do love him. With that face, how could you not?

2 comments:

  1. Why is it that those kinds of things ALWAYS happen on days that are crazy chaotic anyway?

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  2. yes, they will eat their own vomit. I was told it's to keep their area clean...just like when in a large caged area...they will eat their own poo.

    Eew. I did not know that about salt and peroxide. good to know, because I have little ones leaving grapes and such all over.

    We didn't know grapes were dangerous when I was a kid, and when we were eating them, we'd hand one to my mom's dog. She'd roll it around in her mouth and spit back out! Like she knew it was dangerous. We didn't know! The chocolate, we did, but not the grapes!

    Sandi

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