Pick up your socks or this dog may gobble them up.
When a 3-year-old Great Dane from the Portland area was found vomiting and retching, his owner raced him to DoveLewis Emergency Animal Hospital.
The hospital's communications specialist Shawna Harch told The Oregonian that after Dr. Ashley Magee examined the sick dog's X-rays, she saw what looked like "a lot of foreign material in his stomach."
Because the material was deemed indigestible, Magee had to resort to a two-hour surgery to remove the mass.
The contents of his belly? Socks. A lot of them. Forty-three and a half to be precise (a cloud of mystery hangs over the whereabouts of the half-sock).
The Great Dane was discharged only a day after surgery, and as if his survival wasn't a miraculous enough ending to this tale, Veterinary Practice News announced on August 27 that the hospital had won a second-place money prize for their story.
The contest is called "They Ate WHAT?" and has been annually sponsored by the magazine for nearly a decade. All vets were asked to submit an X-ray along with case details.
Oh, and yes -- that means there were weirder entries: the sock-gobbling Great Dane was "beat out" by a frog named Kermit who ate 30 rocks from his cage and tied with a German shorthaired pointer who swallowed a metal shish kabob skewer.
Marilyn Iturri wrote in Veterinary Practice News, “We had many, many great entries. Unfortunately, some terrific and unusual cases were represented by low-resolution radiographs that wouldn’t reproduce well in the magazine and so, didn’t make it to final judging.”
(H/T The Oregonian)