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Naughty dog takes scavenging to new levels
A dog needed major lifesaving surgery after EATING A BUTTER DISH.
Labrador Juno stole the ceramic dish from the sink, crunching her way through it and leaving potentially deadly shards in her stomach.
A Vets Now team had to carry out a three-hour operation in the middle of the night to save the hound after her bizarre feast.
Owners Ian and Amy Collins, from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, have two Labradors, Jess and two-a-half-year-old Juno.
Amy had left the washing up in the sink before popping out. It was when hospitality company operations manager Ian returned half-an-hour later that he discovered what Juno had been up to.
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“To be honest it was so crazy I couldn’t figure out what she’d done at first,” said Ian, 38.
“All I could see was a sheepish-looking dog in her basket and ceramic pieces lying around. We have got a water bowl for her and I thought at first that had broken, but it hadn’t.
“I still can hardly believe it now, but she had obviously climbed up on to the sink, picked the dish up and taken it over to her rug.
“It hadn’t fallen and broken on the tiled floor, she’d carried it over, with the lid on, and then proceed to eat it.
“We know Labradors can be thieves and always thinking of their tummies, but this was just bewildering. I’ve had dogs all my life, but I’d never have imagined she would do something like this.”
With chunks of the dish missing and Juno’s gums bleeding, Ian knew right away that help was needed.
Although it was the middle of the evening, Ian had used Vets Now before and called our pet emergency clinic in High Wycombe.
It’s one of a network of hospitals and clinics open out of hours, seven days a week.
“The vet looked at me in disbelief when I told her what had happened,” said Ian. “She said that they would need to operate immediately and Juno was taken straight to surgery.
“Obviously I was really concerned but in a situation like that you have to trust the vets to do the very best they can for her and I knew she was in the right hands.”
Vet nurse Jenny Green, who was part of the team at Vets Now High Wycombe who treated Juno, said his owners did the right thing in quickly seeking veterinary help.
She said: “Making Juno sick wasn’t an option as the sharp ceramic pieces could lacerate her oesophagus. But leaving them in the stomach wasn’t feasible either as they may have harmed the intestines on the way out.
“After anaesthetising Juno, the vet, Blanca, performed one incision and managed to remove a lot of the ceramic pieces and then had to make another one to access bits she couldn’t reach.
“Thankfully, Juno was stable throughout the operation and very bright the following morning.”
It was such a lengthy procedure that it was after 3am before Ian and Amy got the call they’d been waiting for to tell them all had gone well.
“Remarkably she was pretty much back to her normal self within 48 hours and we just had to be careful she didn’t pull any of her stitches,” said Ian.
“It was a scary incident and such a relief to have somewhere to turn in such an emergency. It has definitely made us reconsider what we leave lying around.”
