The chain had swivels in several places. However, given that the dog was that old, the chain had rusted and broken several times. I believe one of the swivels was lost, which was how the dog was able to twist it.
But, it wasn’t very effective. As the chain got shorter and shorter, the dog would be up on its hind legs, thus unable to twist it any further.
There was a time when we had tropical fish. One day, at dinner, I got a crispy swordtail in my fried potatoes. When Mom cleaned the aquarium, she would put the fish in a bowl on the kitchen counter. It was a short jump to the cutting board.
I had a red eared turtle which was eaten by my Sister’s white rat which had escaped from its enclosure. The remains were disposed of before I got a look.
If the ferret was older, and also was losing hair on both sides of her trunk, she may have had an endocrine tumor that releases estrogen (thus making an otherwise neutered female look like she was in heat). Just another (common) possibility.
The dog with heartworms may have been treated for it, and the worms may have been dead/dying/on its way out, but many years with them would cause heart problems that are not as easily resolved as getting rid of the worms.
The kid who put the cat in the machine should’ve been punished too, but she probably didn’t know/grasp the significance of what she had just done. The adult who sent a 17 year old pet to the shelter did know/grasp the significance of what was about to happen.
My dad had a teeny, tiny little 9 week old Papillon puppy named Mindy, She was about 2 lbs, and thought she was just as big as any of the other dogs in the house. I had 2 Gordon Setters, about 75 lbs eac, and Dad also had a Keeshond & VERY overweight Sheltie.
My Gordons loved Mindy abd they 3 of them would often curl up together on the couch-it was hard to find little Mindy when she snuggled into all that hair.
One morning I was letting the 4 bigger dogs out in the back yard to potty. Mindy slipped outside with them I called her but she ignored me, and I was having potty issues of my own. I yelled at Dad that Mindy went out wiht the big dogs and ran to the bathroom, assiuming he would go get her inside.
He didn’t.
When I went back to the back door, My big girl Fancy was laying in the middle of the yard in a ‘C’ shape and Mindy was layingagainst her belly, along with a dead robin. I called Mindy and she didn’t move.
There was not a mark on her, but her neck was broken. The only thing I can figure was the 4 big dogs were chasing the bird and she got stepped on.
Telling my dad his puppy was dead and watching him hold her little body sobbing was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I still have nightmares over it, and it was close to 10 years ago. I feel responsible for her death.
RIP Mindy, you were a wonderful little puppy that should have had a long, happy life.
My friend’s son had a hamster he kept in cage with metal bars. Somehow, while the kid was at school and his parents were at work, the hamster managed to get his teeth wedged around two of the bars. His head was sideways (the bars were vertical), and the two bars were in his mouth, one against his top teeth, the other against his bottom teeth. It seems the bars were exactly the right distance apart for him to be able to get his mouth around them, but then he couldn’t open his mouth enough to let go, so he was stuck. He was dead when they got home.
No unusual deaths here… though we have a couple of post-death guinea pig tales.
GP #1 died when the vet was trying to sedate her to check out whatever had caused her to quit eating. We buried her in the back yard. A couple of weeks later, we saw a hole where we’d buried her. Either something smelled the ripening corpse and dug it up for a yummy (:eek:) snack… or there’s a zombie undead guinea pig wandering the neighborhood, wheeking for brains.
GP #2 we had put to sleep, when he too quit eating and was losing weight. After we’d spent a small fortune to try to nurse him to health, we had him put to sleep at the vets (intentionally this time!). We knew to put a large flat stone over where we’d buried him.
GP #3 died peacefully in her cage, at age 7.5 which is quite elderly for their species.
However, this was last month, it was bitter cold out, the ground was frozen solid, I was sick, and **Typo Knig **was out of town.
She’s still in a zip-loc in the freezer.
We’re trying to figure out whether we should just discreetly toss the frozen remains in the garbage pickup, or save her until the summer when we can dig a grave!
My brother in law was taking their bunny to school one day, he was a teacher. He put the bunny in a box and headed to his car. He realized he had forgotten something in the house and set the bunny box down on the curb. The box was gone when he came out of the house 15 minutes later.
It was trash day.
A friend of the family had a series of Mastiffs as pets. One, the biggest of them, was an energetic dog and liked to run around with people and horses. While the family was doing an extensive remodel on the house the dog spent a bunch of time on site following the owner around the home. Apparently one of the projects involved replacing the stairs going into the basement and while the guys were in the basement the dog energetically raced around the corner to head down to the stairs. Apparently there was a Scooby-Doo moment when the dog realized that the stairs were gone and his feet were flailing in the air. The dog fell and broke it’s hips or back, I forget exactly which, and was put down.
In college, I had a white betta fish named Lumi. He was friendly but always had a bit of an aggressive streak. One day, I put him in his little container on the kitchen counter and set the lid on top so I could clean his bowl. While I was in the bathroom cleaning out the bowl, I heard a muffled sound, so I left the bowl in the sink and returned to the kitchen. Lumi had pushed against the lid of his little container, launched himself through the air, landed on the floor, and rolled into some dust bunnies under the kitchen counter. My brother, who was nearby, frantically tried to scoop him up and place him back in his container. Alas, poor Lumi was swimming on his side, dusty gills and all. He didn’t survive more than ten minutes. My fish committed suicide.
My first pet when I was 5 or 6 years old, a rabbit, died of Myxomatosis, despite living in the third floor of a town-house, in a city, on an island (Portsmouth, England).
When I was a kid my older brother (14) had three goldfish in a bowl, plus a turtle in its own little habitat. The family went to NYC for a week, and at some point my mother asked my brother what provisions he had made for his pets. She was met with a blank stare. Apparently he thought fish and turtles could go for a week without food or fresh water. He was wrong.
When I was three years old, I let Taffy, my family’s little white Pekingese-Pomeranian mix, outside to play with the sled dogs passing in front of our house. That was the end of Taffy.
That was thirty-five years ago, but I still feel really bad about it.
Years later, my family’s beagle, Snoopy, who was getting on in years and was not super-great at hearing or seeing, startled a moose in our driveway and got stomped on. He died about a day later. Poor stinky Snoopy.
My Aussie Shepherd. His brain was hardwired with one mission: Small creatures must be killed and eaten. Period.
Woe to any cat who jumped the fence into his yard, as he had no fear of teeth or claws. My FIL asked for him to stay on his land, as he had a feral cat problem and, true to his nature he cleared it up quickly. Unfortunately, he’d never seen a porcupine before. The vet gave up after pulling hundreds of quills from him and said he probably wouldn’t recover. He had to be put down. (He killed the porcupine though, so I guess he accomplished his last mission).
Gerbil: escaped when we were getting ready for school. It ran across the room and my dad launched at it, hard. He put it in the cage and it never moved again - he’d karate chopped it while grabbing it.
Cat: I came home and a large plant pot with a small boulder on it was overturned, and the cat was nowhere to be found. I eventually located her behind the dryer in the garage, just walking in one place with her head pressed up against the wall. She could only walk in circles and would only settle when she’d walked into a bucket I put down for her, or curled up under my sheets. I took her to the vet who said ‘massive stroke’ and put her down. I will never know if the boulder hit her head and induced brain damage, or if she knocked it over when she started walking in circles.
Mum found one of her two rats dead in its cage in the morning with its teeth clamped around a bar of the cage. No idea what happened… guessing some sort of seizure and it just reflexively grabbed the bar with its mouth as its final act? Anyway, rigor had set in so she covered it with a cloth and Dad got the happy job of relocating it when he got home from work that afternoon.
She thought that was bad enough, but soon after that the surviving rat became horribly ill during the night while Dad was on night shift. She sat with it as it screamed in pain all night and when Dad got home at 6 or 7am he found himself on rat-euthanising duty.
That was two years ago and I guess the memory has faded because she just got another pair of rats. I couldn’t really blame Dad if he just packed up and left before he gets roped into being rat-dispatcher slash mortician again.
My dog fell headfirst into a hole she had been digging in my moms rose garden and died, apparently of a massive heart attack. My poor little brother came home & found her.