Homework not the only thing dogs eat

Published April 14, 2008

"I'll be a little late coming to work," a co-worker told me when she called one recent afternoon.
"My dog ate an ant trap, and I don't want to leave him alone," she explained.
"Your dog ate an ant trap?" I asked, a little alarmed.
"Yeah, he seems to be all right, but you wouldn't believe what I had to go through.
"I wanted to make him eat salt so he would throw up - but I couldn't catch him," she said.
She finally got him, but only after enlisting the aid of her 4-year-old daughter.
Dogs.
It seems some of them will eat anything, no matter how pampered and well-fed they are.
According to what I've read, this eating of non-food items can be either a medical or a behavioral problem. I guess that means you should take your dog to the vet to make sure there isn't a reason he feels the need to eat socks or rocks - or ant traps. If there isn't, you just have yourself a bad dog.
A friend of mine once had to rush her dog to the 24-hour (very expensive) animal emergency room in the middle of the night because her dog was having seizures. Thinking he may have been poisoned, the vet pumped his stomach only to find it full of Styrofoam packing "peanuts."
No, the dog wasn't being mailed anywhere, but I have a feeling my friend fantasized about it once she got over worrying that he was going to die.
The bearded collie we once had ate the light bulbs out of a bunch of those electric candlesticks that we had put in our windows at Christmas time. He must have gone from window to window like Wee Willie Winkie when we weren't looking.
That was the last Christmas we had candles in our windows.
Sophie, our late and beloved Old English sheepdog, had such a sweet tooth that she didn't let things like wrappers or plastic Easter grass stand in the way when she could smell chocolate.
One Halloween, my husband went to grab the bowl of candy bars off the coffee table for the trick-or-treaters at the door but found it was empty. Sophie had eaten them all.
Unfortunately, we forgot that had happened the following Easter when the bunny left a basket full of chocolates on the floor. Sophie licked it clean, Easter grass and all.
So, anyway, back to the ingestion of the ant trap. As my co-worker talked to me, I typed "dog ate ant trap" into the Google search. I read about a lot of dogs that had eaten ant traps and lived to shed another day.
Actually, it looked as if dogs could eat just about anything without it killing them.
I found stories of dogs that had eaten underwear (that seems to be a favorite) and shoes of all kinds, especially flip-flops. They ate stones and loofah sponges, ropes and string, chains and knives. I was surprised to find that my dog wasn't the only one to eat light bulbs. In fact, they seem to be a popular non-food item among dogs.
My co-worker's husband finally got home to spell her on poison watch, and she came to work.
"Well?" I asked her.
"Oh, he's fine. The vet said the trap was so old it probably wasn't even poisonous anymore," she said.
I guess she should be thankful he's not one of the "gourmet" hounds I read about.
Those dogs wouldn't look twice at an ant trap. They only eat expensive things like iPods or Uggs boots, or even whole couches.
Kind of makes me glad I have a cat.
He won't eat anything.