Candy Nightmare

With Easter looming, a local veterinary service sent out a notice to remind people, "don't let your pets have chocolate"

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We've never intentionally given any of our pets candy - particularly not chocolate - Easter or otherwise. That said ...We'd once had a candy incident with our first pair of bullies.

We'd had to go run a quick errand and had penned the dogs up like we usually did for such absences. We were gone maybe twenty minutes. This time, however, the female decided to break them out of their pen and go after some "low-hanging fruits". We came home to find both dogs sitting happily on the couch, looking at us like, "you forgot to lock us up - we figured it was cool to sit here on the couch."

Then we found the shredded, empty box that had previously been filled with dark-chocolate truffles. A small distance away, we found the remnants of the bag that had about 1.5lbs of a mixed-assortment of jelly beans. Closish to that, we found the remnants of a bag that had been full of dried apricots. All three had been up on the counters. Amusingly, the bag of bison jerky that had been sitting on the ottoman had been left untouched.

Called the vet to get the opinion on whether to bring the dogs down (had to bring both since neither dog had obvious signs of having consumed the goodies and bother were scampering about happily). Vet said that because they were dark chocolate, we needed to bring them down for ipecac, charcoal and sedatives.

Turns out - after a *very* colorful purge - that only one of the dogs had been bad. Even so, both dogs had to suffer the purge-protocol because there wasn't a good way to ensure that both hadn't partaken without the purge.

Both dogs were unscathed by the experience (purging was less than 45 minutes after food-consumption). I always felt bad for the innocent dog, though.