More dog adventures
Wednesday morning, Ursa jumped a fence (wearing her head cone so she doesn't lick her hemorrhoidal butt) and had a romp around the neighborhood. It took 40 minutes to find her; after driving the second loop she followed my car home. The important missing detail is Wednesday is trash day, so I'm looking forward to finding out what she got into.
I yelled at her a lot when I left, so she was very docile when I came home. But more than that, she seemed... off. Then I gave her dinner, and she didn't seem interested in food. Never a good sign from a dog, even less so from one that's woken me up as early as 4 am to feed her.
Since she's not eating, I let her out to go bathroom. She takes a big ol' dump right in view of me, in the middle of the yard, two things she never does. So I figure somethings wrong. Well, besides the diarrhea, there are inch long worms in there, they look exactly like maggots. I'm wondering if maybe she ate some rancid meat, and the maggots moved through her digestive system without losing form.
The Humane Society was still open, so we run over there with poop-in-a-bag (patent pending), and they tell me she has tapeworm. They tell me she most likely got it from fleas, and I start arguing, because she's on FrontLine, and has never had fleas. They tell me she could've eaten a flea, and I tell her to open her ears, my dog doesn't have fleas.
"Well she could've gotten it from eating a rodent, which generally has fleas."
Oh.
There was that time she caught a squirrel, and had it in her mouth for a bit. And that possum corpse she dug up and was snacking on til I caught her with the skull. So, my dog has tapeworm (what dog gains five pounds with a tapeworm?), and they give me medication, which wouldn't be a big deal except she's still not eating, and now her stomach is distended. Bloated, but not sore. She was having bad gas, so I figured it's just gas, as it's not sore, and she doesn't seem too out of it. I figured she just ate a crapload of trash food, and is still full. When she burped up a jalapeno pepper later that night, I amended that to a crapload of tossed-out mexican food, which would explain both the belly and the gas.
Well, I was kinda right. When I got home yesterday, she was back to normal, bouncing around waiting to get fed. In the family room on the floor, waiting for me, was the cause of her woes: she had eaten a couple of large tamales (plus a plastic candy wrapper). When I picked them up, they smelled like jalapeno, and didn't smell like they had gone through her digestive tract, but either way (and I do mean either way), they were out of her body. I realize I'm lucky, that would've done serious damage to a less-bulletproof dog.