The Day I Tried to Poison the Puppy

We have been looking after Tucker during the day while David is back at University and his girlfriend Melissa is at work.  Kind of a paying it forward situation.  I got my first dog when I was going to BCIT. My parents looked after her during the day.  At the end of my two year Survey degree I went north and worked on the Alaska Hwy for six months.  Megan stayed home with my parents.  There was some discussion as to the timing of David getting a dog.  He had a degree to finish, didn't know where he would be working afterwards etc, and I said the timing wasn't good.  But then I remembered the timing of my first dog, and I changed my mind.  So now we have a grand puppy!

 

He is 14 weeks old now and about 20 lbs.  He went to his first puppy class on Tuesday.  He has slept through the night since he arrived, and goes to the door when he needs to go out.  Good Tucker!

We take him on the bush walk in the morning.  He is on leash in the bush for his own safety and our peace of mind. (Think coyotes!)

He checks this bit of ice every morning.  There was a slight dusting on new snow on it today.

David had a short day today, so was able to take Tucker for a walk with us this afternoon.  We were coming back down the road, and I saw three pills on the edge of the road.  I picked them up and put them in my pocket, so that no dog would eat them, and then promptly forgot about them.  When we got back home we went out to the field so Tucker and Shy, Melissa's husky, could have a good play. Tucker came running to me, I gave him a treat, David called him and rewarded him when he got there. I called him back and rewarded him with another treat (I carry tiny treats in my pocket to reward him for doing something 'right').  As he got it and started chewing, it hit me that I hadn't fed him a treat, I had fed him one of the pills.  I frantically tried to scoop in out of his mouth, but I couldn't find it.  I checked my pocket, and could only find one pill, so I must have fed him two?  Panic!!! 

I handed David the pill and asked him to see if he could read the numbers, he could only make out a possible 5 and 0, and then dropped it in the snow.  We raced to the house and called the vet, but he was not in the office and the office staff couldn't help me.  Thank goodness we had Hydrogen Peroxide.  David googled the dosage and we shot it down Tuckers throat.  He certainly wasn't happy about that.  We gave him a bit of food to help with vomiting.  He ran to the door and went outside and vomited numerous times in the snow.  I was scooping it up off the snow with my bare hands into a dish and checking for pills.  Poor Tucker, he just kept vomiting, and I kept scooping and checking for white pills.  In the end we didn't find any, but I was hoping that some of the mucousy stuff that came up contained the dissolved pill.  We did find quite a bit of bird seed that he had mooched off the ground, and bit of hard plastic that he chewed off a container he snagged, as well as his lunch.  The big worry was that we didn't know what the pill was.  David found a site where you could try to figure it out by size, shape, colour, markings etc.  The conclusion was it was most likely Acetaminophen or Vitamin C.  Vitamin C wasn't a problem,  and we kept checking for any symptoms of Acetaminophen overdose.  Tucker obviously didn't feel well.  I wouldn't either, after having a disgusting liquid syringed down my throat, and then vomiting out everything except my stomach lining.

David kept watch and Larry and I walked back up the road in the dark, with a flashlight to try and  find white pills on the edge of the road or on the snowbank (where I found pill #3).  You can imagine how that went, the old 'needle in a haystack'.  No luck, but when we got back, Tucker was feeling somewhat better, and continued to improve.  When Melissa got home, she gave David heck for not phoning her (she works for horse vets who sometimes treat dogs, she said). She phoned one of the vets and he said the fact that we got the hydrogen peroxide into Tucker quickly, and that he had lots of food in his stomach, would have prevented his body from absorbing much if any of the pills.  

He was back to his perky puppy self pretty quickly, thank goodness.  

I think it took me a lot longer to recover.  The adrenaline was still pumping round this old system for a while.

I was given the wise advice to not pick up pills ever again, but instead to grind them into the ground.  Probably not the best for the environment, but at least that way I can't poison puppies.

Larry looked at Tucker tonight and said he could have been called 'Seven'.

I saw it right away, can you?