There’s a story going around Facebook that reminds me of something that happened to us when we had Trix that I somehow never put up here. Maybe it was waiting for its perfect moment.
One day, on a whim, I bought Trix a new puzzle toy. The dog is supposed to roll the thing around and get food out of it! Fun fun fun! It was called a tricky treat ball, and they should have called it a not for Trixie treat ball!
I put Trix’s meal in it and gave it to her. Then Steve and I sat down to eat our own supper. They said the dog could have hours of fun with this thing, so I figured I wasn’t being a jerk for not supervising. After a few minutes, I noticed that the sounds coming from the ball sounded less like bat, bat, crunch, crunch, and more constant and much, much quieter. When I went over, I found Trix holding onto the thing that should have been a ball…only now it was a misshapen mass, and the whole top had been ripped off somehow. I also realized that if I took the mass that remained and tried to shape it back into a ball, it was not nearly the size of the original ball…uh-oh.
At first we hoped that we just had to go on a massive tricky treat ball treasure hunt, and we would find pieces everywhere…but we were not finding many pieces…which led us to the horrible conclusion that Trix had eaten the missing pieces! We were especially worried about this because the next day, we were supposed to be going to a big office party with folks from my awesome job. I had only started working there on a regular basis shortly before that, so I was feeling pretty new. The last thing I needed was for my dog to have a massive puke or poop accident at this fancy place. Plus, this was in the era where work and home were about 35 minutes’ drive from each other, so it wasn’t exactly trivial to get our asses home if necessary.
Through the next day, Steve would sort of look for tricky treat pieces as he went about his regular daily routine, and I was watching Trix’s poop to see if it was looking less…well…normal. We weren’t finding any pieces, but things were looking pretty ordinary. So we went on with the plan.
Trix got through the whole party and I never would have known anything was wrong, so I breathed a sigh of relief. We came home, and after changing into more comfortable clothes, we both fell asleep in the living-room. And a few hours later, we…found the rest of the tricky treat ball. To be more accurate, Trix produced it.
I still don’t remember this part, but at one point, some part of my brain must have heard Trix throwing up, and while most of me was still asleep, I uttered the words “Are ya ok? Are ya done pukin’?” At the same time, Steve had come to his senses enough to notice an unpleasant smell nearby that he could not identify. As soon as I uttered the words “Are ya done pukin’?” he was wide awake. “Puke…puke…pukin’?! Who’s pukin’?! I’m not pukin’! Oh…that smell…oh!”
So, although we did not have a dog poop-filled house, like in this sad tale below, there was definitely some 3 a.m. dog accident clean-up to be done. At least no electronics were sacrificed in the process, like happened to this guy’s poor roomba.
https://www.facebook.com/jesse.newton.37/posts/776177951574
I had forgotten about that little tail. I once saw her rip the everloving hell out of a Kong to remove a stubborn hunk of sweet potato, but I was right there to salvage the resulting shrapnel and keep anything from being consumed.
We were in the same room, and the damn toy was marketed as “durable.” Not Trix-durable, obviously!