On Monday, January 3, the Animal Welfare Society of SA’s busy hospital treated several dogs with bones stuck in their mouths or throats.
Their first patient was a distressed 12-year-old Husky Cross named Darnell who had to be admitted due to a large chunk of stew bone painfully embedding in her lower jaw that hindered her ability to eat, drink or breath properly.
Her owner attempted to pull the bone out, but soon realised that he was ill-equipped for the task.
“We had no sooner removed the dangerous shard of bone from Darnell’s mouth when another little dog named Archer was rushed in by his owner”, says the Animal Welfare Society of SA.
Archer had a chicken bone (drum stick) dangerously wedged across the width of his mouth causing him extreme pain and distress His owner also tried to fish out the bone, but in the process pushed it to the back of his mouth almost down his oesophagus lacerating his tongue in the process.
After spending the past two days trying to dislodge the brittle chicken bone she finally came to the realization that she too was hopelessly ill-prepared to deal with the emergency.
The AWS SA team thankfully managed to remove the bone from Darnell’s mouth without too much trouble but Archer was so distressed and fearful that he needed to be sedated before they could safely remove the chicken bone.
In both instances, their owners ignored their intuition and conceded to feeding the dogs cooked bones. They did vaguely consider the dangers of the bones splintering and getting stuck, but never thought that any harm would ever come to their pets.
“In our opinion, all bones (cooked or raw) are potentially dangerous for our pets and we would subsequently encourage all pet owners to add I will never feed my pets bones to their list of New Year’s resolutions”, the Animal Welfare Society of SA concluded.
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Picture/s: Supplied