Hi,
This is my first post, and I was compelled to comment on Cecil’s classic response from the Straight Dope email I got today.
It seems a yoga afficionado wanted to know if you could swallow a long piece of cloth and pull it out the other end. While it might be an ingenious way to floss your butt, I’m here to tell you it can lead to a painful death. At least in the case of household pets.
Here’s the gruesome tale. When i was about 11 years old we had a cat. A pretty nice cat overall…Amelia was her name. Well, Amelia liked to play with things like the cords on the draperies and blinds, so one day my Mom gave her a long piece of yarn to play with. Of course we’ve all seen those sickeningly cute posters of kittens batting around a ball of yarn, or sticking their heads out of a knitting basket half entangled in bunches of yarn. So what more natural toy for a cat to play with? Or so we thought.
We watched Amelia play with the yarn a bit and then left her to her own devices and didn’t give a second thought to that piece of yarn. Until a few days later that is. Amelia seemed a little disconcerted, and upon inspection my mom noticed a piece of yarn sticking out of Amelia’s butt and went to grab it. When Amelia felt my mom grab hold, she took off like a bat out of hell…my mom still holding on to the yarn. In about a second there was 10 feet of cat-poop-covered yarn on the floor and the cat was howling in some distress.
Since she was obviously in pain my mom took the cat to the vet who put her down immediately. If it’s not already clear, this is what happened. Some time after becoming bored with batting the yarn around, Amelia found one end of it and began chewing. She swallowed a little bit and couldn’t really figure out how to spit it back out, so she just kept swallowing until she had consumed the entire length. Instead of balling up in her stomach like Cecil suggested it might, it managed to work its way through the folds and coils of Amelia’s intestines until it peeked out enough for my Mom to grab hold. When Amelia took off away from my mom, the yarn - which was folded in Amelia’s intestines - straightened out, but her intestines did not. The yarn essentially sliced through her intestines in a straight line from her stomach to her anus. It would have been nearly impossible to repair all of the damage done to her intestines, so Amelia now rests in peace.
I still feel bad about this even though I know my mom was just trying to give her something to play with. So if any of you cat lovers out there want to give your cat a piece of yarn or string make sure it is short, and that you tie both ends to something.
Sorry to hit you all with such a gross, sad, cat death story. I’ll try to find something a bit cheerier for my next post.
similarly, but more happily, i once had a cat that swallowed a used condom (i guess it tasted nice). again, saw it protruding from said cat’s butt and removed it (eugh!). no harm done, perhaps the lubrication helped (and of course, size)!
Try cutting some meat with a piece of string, then we’ll talk.
(I am NOT saying that tugging harshly on a piece of swallowed string protruding from a cat’s anus couldn’t cause some damage (possibly even fatal), but “your” description is just too pat.)
I’m almost certain that R. Crumb’s brother in the movie engages in exactly the type of complete cleansing ritual you’re talking about–where (after several days of fasting, I believe) he swallows the end of a long piece of cloth, and ends up tying it in a closed loop after he passes the lead end out his back end, as it were.
I don’t particularly care whether you believe it or not, as I know it it the God’s honest truth, because I saw it happen to my pet.
By the way, I didn’t say it cut through her leg or any other meaty part of her body, in fact it didn’t damage her anus at all. It was the soft tissue of the intestine that was damaged.
So your suggestion of trying to cut “meat” with string doesn’t apply. Although I enjoy the idea of you sitting in your kitchen trying it.
I have a better experiment to test the veracity of my story. Why don’t you swallow about 70 feet of yarn. That would be the proportional equivalent of what Amelia swallowed given the probably differences in your size. Then when it starts to come out, call your Mom and say, “Mom, I need you to pull something out of my butt, again.” Then have her grab one end while you sprint down the street.
I can’t believe people are so skeptical in this forum. Speaking of string, this really happened. I swear it’s a true story:
A piece of string goes into a bar and orders a drink.
The bartender says, “We don’t serve string in here.”
The string walks out, dejected. Then he has an idea. First he ties himself into a bow and ruffles the top of his head, leaving stray bits of string waving about.
He walks back into the bar and orders another drink.
The bartender asks, “Hey…aren’t you that string I just kicked out of here.”
With a shake of his head the strong replies, “No, I’m a frayed knot.”
I saw the movie of which you speak (movie description at IMDB.) Yes, one of R. Crumb’s brothers does claim to engage in that exercise in the movie, but we never see him actually do it.
And welcome to the SDMB Torus. Please include a link to the Straight Dope column at the beginning of the thread when you post in this forum. Thank you for posting it later after it was requested.
Was the yarn that caused the death of your cat Amelia made out of wool?
I’m afraid I don’t really recall what the yarn was made of. It was quite a while ago and I don’t think I even knew what it was made of at the time. My guess is that it was probably a partly wool blend. Knowing my Mom as I do, it certainly wasn’t an expensive wool.
Not that it helps, but I can tell you that I remember distinctly that is was green.
As disgusting as this is, I feel compelled to comment. I once owned a very stupid cat who liked to eat pretty much everything in sight. At Christmas she would always play with the ornaments and such on the tree. One year around the holidays I noticed something shiny stuck to the fluff around her butt. I went to pick it off, but it turned out to be not so much stuck to her buttfluff as stuck in her butt. Well, you can probably guess what happened - I quickly pulled about 2 feet of tinsel out of her ass. Much freaking out occured at this point - both from the cat, who was in a sort of frenzied panic, and from me, who had just been engaged in innocent cat fur mantainance and ended up with a giant piece of poo-covered tinsel in my hand.
Anyways, the point of this is that while both me and the cat were emotionally scarred for life, physically she seemed to be just fine. Incidently this cat lived to be almost 20 and died, not of buttfloss, but of old age - which just proves that being stupid makes you live longer.
Okay, this is a bit gross, but I can prove that Cecil is wrong that “Peristalsis … would be ineffective in overcoming all the friction that hauling a string would entail.” When I was little (aged 3 or 4), I used to chew all sorts of things, and one of my favourites was this yellow string that my father had. It had a kind of nutty taste that I loved. So one day, I swallowed a piece of this string… The next day, imagine my relief when there was the string, along with “some other stuff” hanging out of my bottom! What Cecil doesn’t take into account (and I’m posting this only for the sake of scientific research) is that faeces of the right consistency might well adhere to the string or cloth, and thus allow peristalsis to do its job.
Hello, and welcome to the Straight Dope, where skepticism is a virtue. That’s right, the denizens here tend not to take things as true just because someone else says so. The wilder the claim, the less likely to be believed. We want evidence, not just anecdotes.
It’s funny. The X-Files made popular the phrase “The truth is out there,” but all the while promoting the most unsubstatiated paranoid delusional nuttiness. They should have said, “The truth is out there, 'cause you’ll never get any from us.”
But Unwashed, I don’t find Torus’s description that unbelievable. I cite is nice (happily supplied by DDG - thanks!), but if the description is too pat, perhaps it’s just your visualization of the effect.
My vet, Richard Chaille, DVM, told us about a patient of his. This cat owner (whoops, I meant this cat’s staff) embroidered as a hobby. The cat apparently ate a piece of embroidery floss, starting with both ends. Later, when the cat was found to be vomiting blood and choking, the vet found the floss looped under the critter’s tongue, inflaming the mouth. Fortunately, the piece was not very long, and the vet was able, during surgery, to recover it from the esophagus, stomach, and small intestine.
Scarier yet, says Dr. Rick, is the cats who eat a length of tough button thread, only to find a needle on the end. Never, he says, should a cat’s home contain a threaded needle where the cat can get to it.
