I am serious about this question, but another caveat: it is gross, so much so that I’m going to put it in a spoiler box for the benefit of the squeamish. If you freak out, don’t read below. It’s about a doggy doo-doo oddity.
[spoiler]My dog is a 15 lb. 6 month old JR Terrier mix. He has an odd problem occasionally: he’ll try and relieve himself but the “bombs” won’t break; they come out in a long continuous rope-like way instead. The really bad thing is that often he can’t get them out and has to have “help” [i.e. me pulling it the rest of the way with a stick or a piece of tissue], and the really really bad thing is that he knows to come to me for said help!
This doesn’t happen daily (thank Osiris) or even weekly, but it has happened several times over the last few months. Is this indicative of anything that could be a health problem? Has it ever happened to your dogs?
Our dogs used to have problems with constipation. The vet told my mom that we should feed the dogs pumpkin (canned, I think) to help things out. It works, and the dogs like eating the pumpkin.
I don’t really have an answer, but hey, it’s happened to all of us at one time or another. At least your dog knows to go to you. Ours just sit there trying to lick it out themselves!
I would give your vet a quick call, though. Won’t cost you anything and takes only a minute or two.
two times… the first time was my first puppy… the poop was attached by an invisible ‘string’… almost like a spider web… i bought the dog from some idiot woman who didn’t get the puppies their shots… i secretly believe the puppy had worms, in retrospect, because this was my first dog… ever… and i learned the hard way.
the second time this happened was with my second dog, cracker too… we have always given him stuffed animals and hats to chew up… and i think he swallows the strings sometime… and they all kind of formed a turd that he couldn’t push out… here’s a small excerpt of the experience from a story i’m working on…
One of the things I worry about the entire time I’m walking the dog through our neighborhood is his sudden urge to go to the bathroom in someone else’s yard. I worry about it so much that if he even poses in the number two position, I make him run all the way back to the house or to an empty lot. Directly after his wild bull episode, I managed to get him over to the empty lot at the corner of Holly and Chestnut, where he promptly squatted for a dump. I was so busy trying to analyze what just happened over on Chestnut, I didn’t realize he’d kept moving and squatting and moving and squatting.
“That’s when I noticed something was sticking out of his butt,” I said, pathetically. “I looked at this poor dog and realized he was trying to poop out a stick or something, but it wouldn’t come out.
“I looked around the lot and found a stick and tried to kind of wipe it out of there, but that didn’t work. Luckily I found the receipt you wanted from my trip to the store in my pocket. I used that to pull whatever that was out of his butt.”
Summer started laughing. I didn’t understand if it was my remorseful, pathetic voice or the fact I didn’t pause while telling this story, but I could tell she was buying this more than the story about Monkey not liking black people.
Since she was laughing, I thought I give her the full humiliating story, “After I pulled the stick out of his butt with the receipt, we started walking home. That’s when I noticed the old man with the house right next to the lot, sitting in his carport in a chair that was facing everything that just happened.”
That’s probably what happened to Ollie. He had to go to the vet recently after a day of vomiting because of swallowing string and stuffing from his toys. (At first I had thought his vomit was full of worms and nearly had heart failure, but on closer inspection it was just cloth strings.) On the vet’s advice I purged the house of all “stringy” and stuffed toys and stocked up on rawhide chews, edible toys and tennis balls, but he stashes treats and toys throughout the house for times of famine and actually remembers where they are, so I’ll still find him in a corner or on a bed going after yet another of the string toys to survive the String Pogrom (either that or the things are breeding).
*During a housecleaning recently I must have found a dozen treats from his daily “good boy” walks under cushions, in a pillowcase, under chairs, etc.- from time to time he’ll evidently decide that I’ve been good and just from out of nowhere run out of the room, come back in, leave a treat on my lap, and run off. Man I love dogs.
