Yesterday, our neighbors went to the beach, so we had their pool and their big yard for the dogs to play in. Their cattle dog, Ruby, barked a bit through the window when we arrived, but she didn’t want to come out to play, and after a while our Boxers, Molly and Rocky, lost interest and started running around the far end of the yard. It’s about an acre long.
After a couple hours, Ruby did come out, and for about five minutes the dogs played nicely. Then Ruby sensibly went back inside — it was 95 degrees by the pool. Unfortunately, Rocky followed her through the dog door. Now we didn’t have the house keys, so I called “Rocky” through the dog door, but nothing happened. And he’d never been in that house before, so it was a playground. Then Ruby started barking and came tearing out the dog door, chased by Rocky. I quickly got him on his leash, and, as quickly, Ruby ran back inside. But she wasn’t barking, just watching us through the window. I tried to lure her to the dog door again, to give her one of Molly and Rocky’s treats as a reward, but she wasn’t interested. Meanwhile, I let go of Rocky, and he and Molly took off to the other end of the acre.
After maybe five minutes, I gave up on Ruby. It was clearly cooler inside the house, and she didn’t want my treat anyhow. She disappeared, never to be seen again. When I got back to Rocky and Molly, it seemed Rocky had found a chlorine tablet from the pool and was noshing on that. He hadn’t found it for the first two hours we were there, so I’m guessing he got more adventuresome while I was trying to buy off Ruby. Or maybe he simply liked the smell of chlorine because he’d been occasionally lapping out of the pool. Saying “Rocky — No!” just makes him drink faster. In any case, I quickly took both dogs home, checked the Poison Control site on the Internet, and gave Rocky lots of water and absorbent food. Then we monitored him.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of his adventures. When I went to walk fretting Molly, who was possibly jealous of all the attention Rocky was getting, Rocky slipped past me and got to a lunchbox one of our other neighbors had left on their front porch. The lunchbox had a slice of pizza in it, which Rocky downed before I got to him. “Rocky — No!” just made him eat faster. When I asked our neighbor how old the pizza was, he said, “Oh, a couple of days.” And it had been sitting out all the time, in a hot box, incubating. So we fed Rocky more absorbent food and more water. Obviously, Rocky’s food-driven, so he’ll eat anything.
The good news is that all the food pushed the chlorine tablet — tiny white pellets still intact — out of his system overnight, and he seems to be OK. And I guess either the rotten pizza didn’t hurt him or the chlorine neutralized it.