Oy Vey!! This one was my fault. Don had given Brutus a bath on Sunday, and I was going to wait until he was dried off on Sunday night to put his "flea and tick" medicine on the back of his neck. Typically, if he even sees the container he starts jumping around and runs away, so I have to assume that it burns a little or the smell bothers him or something. Basically, he hates it and has to be tricked in to laying still while it is applied.
I had broken one of the foil sealed tubes off of the row that held three and put it on top of my suitcase, not thinking that he would ever go near it. Big mistake on my part. Just before we were getting ready to leave to go to our friends house to watch the big Vikings/Packers football game, I find the tube of, basically pesticide, with big tooth marks in it, and it's three quarters empty. Now the big question is, did he ingest this, or did it spill some place. Ugh.
Don and I are both trying to read through the emergency warnings in the pamphlets that come in the package, and there are plenty of warnings for human consumption, but all it says about animals is "For External Use Only". OK, that's helpful. We headed to the human dangers and warning section, and it said to have the person sip some water, and call poison control if it was consumed. Well, we were doing the right hand left hand thing here. We weren't sure he consumed it. We knew he had punctured it, but this stuff is gross. I can't imagine he had consumed it, other than what maybe got on his tooth. We did think that at the very least he should have some water. Was he going to cooperate with that? Nope. I had a nice bowl of fresh cool water and he stuck his nose right up in the air, so I added a little sugar to the water since Brutus has a big sweet tooth, and even that didn't work. We're now ten minutes late for the party, when Don looks at me and says "I'll be right back". He runs downstairs and comes running back up with a Leinenkugel's in his hand. That's right. Our dog LOVES beer. He will do anything to steal your beer. Don cracked it open, and Brutus was going for the can before Don could even poor any in to the water bowl.
Don added some beer to the water, and Brutus drank all of the water down like a champ. He would have finished off the beer too, but we weren't sure that poisoning him and getting him drunk in the same night would be a good thing to explain to the veterinarian if that was where we ended up!
So, after he was well hydrated, we got him cozied up in the garage with his food and water and kennel with his favorite blankets and toys, and took our chances. He seemed perfectly normal (for Brutus), and there wasn't much more that we could do. We went to the football party, I with a somewhat heavy heart, but came home three hours later to our happy rambunctious Brutus. Thankfully, he must have only punctured the flea and tick poison and not ingested it. Lesson learned. From now on, I will keep it out of his reach until I am actually applying it to his skin. I will be so glad when it freezes hard and we are done with these darn ticks. Don pulled another tick off the back of his ear yesterday that had gotten tucked in there and was huge (for a deer tick). I don't know if the flea and tick stuff loses it's effectiveness toward the end of the month and no longer kills them off like it's supposed to, or if the ticks are getting immune, but I'm ready to be done with flea and tick season!! Yuck!!
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