Household items can be deadly if eaten by pets (2)

"I was skeptical. I X-rayed, and it didn't show up. But he was absolutely certain. He was adamant," she said.

Halligan said she made the dog vomit and "sure enough, we pulled a foot-long tube sock out of this miniature apricot poodle, and the dog was fine."

X-rays quite clearly show many other things pets swallow. In March, Tim Kelleher's 13- year-old Jack Russell terrier got sick and he rushed him to the vet. X-rays showed the dog had eaten a pile of US pennies.

Toxic coins

Dr Amy Zalcman at Blue- Pearl Veterinary Partners in New York used a camera attached to a net to fish 111 pennies out of Jack's stomach.

Scooping up five at a time, it took a couple of hours.

Letting the coins pass could have killed Jack because US pennies made after 1982 contain toxic zinc.

Zalcman didn't check the dates on the pennies, "but many were corroded, suggesting that they were being digested," she said.

Jack goes jogging daily and eats the best holistic food on the market, but he's got a voracious appetite and is always licking things off the floor, Kelleher said.

The day the long-legged, broken-coat terrier ate the pennies, Kelleher had left a sack with a few bagel crumbs on his desk. While going after it, Jack knocked over a jar of pennies. As Jack licked the crumbs off the floor, he slurped up the pennies, too.

Kelleher thought he had "Jackproofed" his apartment. But just a few days ago, the dog ate a whole bag of hamburger rolls after pulling it off a kitchen counter.

While some human foods are fine for pets, others, like chocolate, can be deadly to dogs and cats.

For those who keep flower bouquets in the house, eating just one lily can kill a cat. Preservative packets for the water in the vase also can make animals sick if they drink it.

In seven years of emergency veterinary medicine, Zalcman has removed a variety of items from pets, including jewelry, condoms and a new No. 2 pencil with an eraser. Some of her colleagues have retrieved forks and blades, she said.

In Halligan's 24 years as a vet, the most unusual object she had to retrieve from a dog's stomach was a Mickey Mouse hat. "You could see the plastic parts on the X-ray," Halligan said.

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