pet connection

I get stories. Boy, do I get stories. For my current column, they were about holiday “incidents.” There were Karen Henderson’s Labs in Ohio who knocked over the Christmas tree just a few days ago. The various dogs who use live trees as their indoor, um, watering station–and I don’t mean for drinking. The cat who would perch in the Christmas tree and stick his head out to scare people walking by. The joyous eating of various forms of chocolate and the not so joyous aftermath. The two dogs that dragged the fully decorated Christmas tree through the house and up the stairs. The cat that knocked the tree over.

As so often happens, not everything makes it into the column. Here are a few outtakes.

O Christmas tree, how you are blocking my view

My friend Audrey Pavia recalls the time that the aptly named Star, a Siberian Husky/Collie mix, came to visit when his owners went away for the holidays.

We lived in a house with a big, beautiful bay window in the front room. We had a magnificent tree that year, covered with Victorian-style glass ornaments we had collected over the years. We placed it right in front of the bay window and topped it with a crystal angel. One afternoon, we heard a huge crash. We raced into the front room and found the tree lying on the floor. Broken ornaments lay everywhere, and the crystal angel was smashed to pieces. Standing next to the tree and gazing out the window, completely oblivious, was Star. Apparently, the tree was blocking his view of the street, so he just pushed it out of the way.

O Christmas tree, take two

I didn’t hear from the aforementioned Karen Henderson–to whom I am sort of related by marriage–until after the column ran. She sent pictures of her overturned tree, along with a theory as to the identity of the culprit.

We think the tree fell down because the yellow Lab ran into it while rolling around her Buster ball. We know it could not have been the chocolate Lab because she would have slunk around the rest of the day thinking she did something terrible.

No moral to either story, or advice, except maybe to make more of an attempt to secure the tree by blocking it off with an x-pen–I know of one person who decorates the x-pen, too, so it looks like part of the decor–or attaching the top of the tree to the ceiling with fishing line.

Canned pumpkin, more than just pie filling

When your dog downs a piece of glass from an ornament,  it’s safer just to let him pass the glass out the other end rather than induce vomiting, says Scott Shaw, a board-certified emergency/critical care veterinarian at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, Massachusetts. But here’s a tip, which got cut from the column, courtesy of my own vet, John Hamil, at Canyon Animal Hospital in Laguna Beach.

If it’s something that we think the dog can pass, we will usually feed them pumpkin. The fiber of the pumpkin will often get around the foreign body and help it to move along. So if you had plastic wrap or string or things that it’s hard for the intestinal tract to get any purchase on, that’s really been helpful. Or if they eat something like a piece of plastic or ceramic or somethiing that might be sharp, the pumpkin will help that as well.

Or you can take the advice of Linda Barton, a board-certified emergency/critical care veterinarian in Lynnwood, Washington:

If it’s something that’s at risk of cutting up the esophagus, probably the safest thing is to go right away to the vet so someone with an endoscope can retrieve it. The dog is anesthetized but doesn’t have surgery, you know it’s gone, and you don’t take any risk of cutting up the esophagus if you induce vomiting.

Avoiding the holiday blues

Of course, we all know that the best cure for pet-related holiday hazards is prevention. Henderson has that one down:

When the house is full of company, we always put the dogs in their cages with their Kongs. They are in heaven and safe from anything that could happen. The guests are safe from having their shins whacked by a Lab tail or their drinks being swooshed off the coffee table.

My only holiday story is the time the very tip of Savanna’s tail got caught in the door as we were leaving the house one Christmas Eve. She seemed fine and we didn’t see any bleeding, so we went on our way. When we returned, we walked in the front door to find blood spattered everywhere, continuing up the stairs. It looked like a murder scene. Apparently, there was some bleeding. For months afterward, we kept finding little spots of blood on the walls.

What’s your holiday story?