The Dog Who Ate Christmas
At three A.M. you can slip anything past me. It's obvious. Back in the 80s, while visiting friends and sleeping on a couch in their living room, I heard a rustle through the front windows in the moonlight, peered out in a sleepy haze, and saw a stranger, a man, petting the family dog in the front yard. "Huh," I said to myself, "there's a guy petting Bob" and went back to sleep. I did not wake again when he later picked the back door lock and raided the house room-by-room, stealing every wallet there, even taking an air conditioner out of the bedroom of sleeping children on his way. No, no one else woke up either, but the point is — I had been awake. I saw him and for some lack of reason or processing, I failed to be alarmed.
Something in that sweet, dark hour inspires undeserved trust.
Early in the morning of New Year's Day, I heard a sound, like a spoop. Yes. Spoop. It woke me up. I remember rousing, a brief "Huh?", but then I went back to sleep. Perhaps this was due to my natural 3 AM stupour; perhaps it was aided by the three glasses of Dom Perignon I'd had the night before. (My first taste of that label, and really, one requires a fuller experience than one glass.) Whatever the reason, I didn't spin into action. I live in a house of five dogs and four cats. Lots of things go tink, pock, or spoop in the night. No need to get alarmed. And I didn't.
But the next morning I found the shining remnants of a Christmas ornament under my bed. Thin as fragments of egg shell from a drug trip — blue, crimson and green on the outside, silver on the inside. The fragments were large. This had not been a shatter, but a simple break by force. The cap and the hook were missing.
"Spoop," I thought, as I gazed at Mr. Sprits'l, my 11-month old Pomeranian. He's an involved little guy, and when Mum's crawling around under the bed, this is worth watching. Sprits is a dog who has, in the past, attempted to eat matchbooks, sunglasses, a Waterman pen, twenty dollar bills, and a cicada having its head eaten off by a preying mantis (two for the price of one!). Mr. Sprits'l will put his mouth on anything, and it was clear that a cat had been in cahoots, knocked an ornament down into the tree skirt, and Sprits carried his prize in under my bed to gnaw it, where it broke.
There was a handful of large whole shards, but a lot of tiny fragments as well. Clearly the dog had had some glass in his mouth. Probably he'd swallowed some. No cap. No hook. That was a worry.
I looked at Mr. Sprits'l, and he looked at me. He's a pretty, congenial little dog, with a foxlike grin and a tongue inclined to hang out sideways when he's happy. There was no sign of blood on his fur, and his tongue looked fine.
"Hey, buddy," I said. "Did you eat Christmas?"
Sprits'l streeeeetttttched and yawned, and I got a good look into his mouth from there under the bed. It looked well enough.
Still.
I got on Google and typed in [ dogs eat foreign objects ]. Up came 10 pages of sites, including the rather daunting "Strange Objects Found in Dog Feces Discussion Forum." I shiver at the thought that people would want to spend their Friday evenings huddled around a warm computer, comparing notes, talking about it.
A few pages down, some veterinary sites were more helpful about potential problems and symptoms, giving me a nice checklist of What To Watch For. God bless the Web.
Still.
So I called the emergency vet, explained the situation, the tiny shards, the missing hook and cap. Just as my housemate called, "I FOUND THE CAP" from the living room, the vet said "He probably didn't eat the hook. It's probably still on the tree." No, I didn't need to bring him in. Yes, they were open 24 / 7. Yes, I should just watch him. Yes, the checklist I had was accurate.
"If he'd eaten anything as large as an ornament hook, he'd be in some discomfort by now. Keep an eye on his bowel movements," she advised. "You'll get an idea how much glass he ingested that way." I'd read about fresh blood from low down and older blood from higher up the digestive tract, and she agreed. "You don't have to be a psychic to read dog poop," she said — then with an unexpected streak of sadism went on: "Just look close in bright light."
So that is how I spent my New Year's Day — bent over Mr. Sprits'l's small, sparkling piles in the back yard, their twinkle diminishing with the passage of time, a bowl of Eukanuba, and two Beggin' Strips. My Scottish family would laugh at this, smug at their Hogmanay revels, generous with their whiskied cautions to be careful what you do on New Year's Day, because that's what you'll be doing all year long.
It's a sad prospect. While Mr. Sprits'l may look forward to a healthful year of taste testing objects not made for eating, Strange Objects Found in Dog Feces Discussion Forum — here I come.
