How to Make a Dog Vomit

You gotta love the internet. You can google "how to make a dog vomit" and instantly access dozens of references on how to get your dog to hurl. This is handy when you have been invited by friends to bring your puppy and join them for dinner at their home. It works particularly well when a laptop already lies open and connected on their kitchen table. Let me demonstrate:

My husband Charlie and I were invited for dinner by our friends Lynne and Bill. They had been charmed by our puppy, Suki, the day after she came to live with us, so she was invited to dinner, too. While Bill prepared vegetarian chili, Charlie and I enjoyed hors d'oeuvres and Lynne plied Suki with oodles of doggie biscuits. When our dinner was nearly ready - Suki had had hers before we left home - Charlie took Suki outside to do whatever she might need to do. Within a minute or two he was shouting for me to come quick.

Because it was dark out, he wasn't certain, but he thought Suki had wolfed down a dead mouse. He was pretty sure he had seen a mouse's tail disappearing into her mouth. Puppies hoover up everything, so a dead mouse was no surprise. But it became a concern when Bill suggested that it might have been a mouse poisoned by bait used in their basement.

To be on the safe side, we agreed that we'd best make the puppy throw up. I vaguely remembered something to do with hydrogen peroxide and suggested Lynne google "how to make a dog vomit". Bingo. One to two teaspoons hydrogen peroxide by mouth. Wait five minutes. Stand back.

After Lynne found an old bottle of hydrogen peroxide there was a brief debate about whether the dose should be upped because the stuff didn't have much fizz left and whether or not the relative fizziness mattered. Anyway, as I squirted two teaspoons into Suki I was grateful that the five minute interval meant she wasn't likely to connect effect to cause.

Outside we all went to await the outcome. Which, after five minutes, was nothing. Back inside we went to consult the computer for plan B. Of course, while Lynne was at the laptop, Suki, in the dining room, started to heave. As I tried to get her outside, Lynne said not to worry, so the four of us stood by, murmuring encouragingly, as Suki brought up every biscuit, the whole of her dinner and, at last, a damp leaf whose long stem could easily pass in the dark for the tail of a poisoned mouse. Suki looked not at all comforted by the rarity of four adult human beings hovering around telling her what a very very good girl she was for losing her cookies all over the dining room floor.

Bill's chili, by the way, was fabulous.

Where Puppies Come From

Sometimes puppies just happen to you. They can be surprises like the sheltie mix puppy my dad snuck under my mother's radar when I was ten. They can abruptly bewitch you like a collie/husky puppy did to me one day when I walked into a pet shop just to buy cat toys. (He turned out to be the best $5.00 investment I ever made.) They can take advantage of your hospitable heart by dropping one by one - all thirteen of them - onto the kitchen floor of a Brooklyn apartment because you were - ok, I was - foolish enough to take in their woebegone, stray and very pregnant mother. Sometimes they are found after a search of shelters when you are lonely in a strange city. Sometimes they happen because you don't listen to the wee voice that tells you that the pup you've driven four hours to get is not quite right and you bring him home anyway. And sometimes they happen to you because you work part time at a border collie rescue and your boss knows before you do that this is the puppy you didn't know you were looking for...

...which is how I come to have Suki.

Suki is ostensibly an Aussie; about 16 weeks old when this photo was taken. She showed up just about the time we began preparing to launch The Home-to-Home Blog so her puppyhood is going to be shanghaied as material for blog posts. Poor girl...

Welcome to the new Home-to-Home Blog

Home-to-Home has created this new forum for sharing some stories, insights & advice about pet ownership and adoption. Our bloggers are all long time pet owners and adopters with countless stories to illustrate the many joys and frustrations of lives lived with animals. We invite readers of the Home-to-Home Blog to submit comments, questions and stories of their own in response to our posts. Because there is always more to learn about life with the four-legged, we hope to create a helpful and engaging dialog between our bloggers and readers. So, please drop in - and join in - often. We're looking forward to hearing from you all. CG