“Oscar, NO!”
That is generally how I start and end my day. Oscar is a golden colored retriever, with the bark and appetite of a beagle. I married into my relationship with Oscar, which is probably why him and I don’t generally see eye to eye- my husband’s methods of training dogs has never been very consistent to say the least, so Oscar was pretty much aloud to run rampant and do as he pleased for the first few years of his life. He still does (my husband is a bit of a push over when it comes to his dog), but he’s certainly gotten better now that we have some structure in our home.
One day I came home and found a bar of soap on the floor with a chunk missing and teeth marks in it. Since we have 3 dogs, I was able to narrow it down to two- Oscar and Cooper. My husband was adamant that it was cooper because Oscar would NEVER do something like that (cue eye roll from me). Well, curiosity got the better of me so I called both of them over and made them sit. I put the bar of soap on the floor between them; Cooper sniffed it and walked away. Oscar, however, snatched it up and ran! My husband rolled his eyes and said nothing. We then decided that the bathroom door had to stay closed so Oscar could never get the soap again.
A week or so later, I came home from work and found a small piece of soap on the dog bed. I honestly didn’t think anything of it at the time, because I thought it might have been from the first bar of soap- maybe Oscar had brought the soap under the bed and that was the piece that broke off.
I realized later that evening that was not the case. When I went to give my son a bath, I noticed the bar of soap that was in his bath caddy was gone. The bath caddy was in his room on a shelf that I assumed was up high enough that the dogs couldn’t reach, but I guess I was wrong. I searched everywhere for that bar of soap, but found nothing. Oscar was acting fine, so I opted to not go to the local 24 hour veterinary hospital and to instead call my vet the next morning.
When I spoke to my vet, they said odds are he would be fine since it happened almost 24 hours prior and he was showing no symptoms, which was a relief. Of course, my dog had other plans. Within an hour of speaking to my vet, he vomited up a huge, foamy pile of food and bile. He was acting fine, so I decided to wait and see how he was. Ten minutes later, another huge pile of vomit. Looks like we were going to the vet!
The veterinarian examined him and said since soap is an irritant, that’s probably why he was vomiting so much. Although he did agree that it was odd that it started 24 hour later. The most they could do was re-hydrate him, and give him some medication to stop the vomiting and to coat the stomach so the soap wouldn’t be so irritating. Oscar was back to his old self within a few days.
We keep all soap in a locked cabinet now.