Pot-pourri is not food

Around late January early February Henry was settling in well. We still had major issues with the house training but apart from that he was improving every day. He was doing incredibly well at dog training and amazingly for me I was keeping it up at home too so he was turning into the best behaved dog I'd ever owned. He was also sleeping through the night but I was still having to get up at the crack of dawn to beat his bladder to the back door every morning.

The one thing Henry was still mad about was food. He was still slightly underweight and his main interest in life was finding anything that was vaguely edible, this included any type of vegetable (cooked or uncooked), anything run over and long dead on the road, raiding the compost heap and also the kitchen bin.

One thing we weren't banking on was that Henry would go on a night time scavange hunt into areas of the house that even we had forgotten about. This resulted in him managing to squeeze into the six inch wide gap that ran along the back of the sofa to retreive some long lost, non smelly (to us) pot-pourri that I'd temporarily placed there when we moved in after failing to find a home for it and promptly forgotten about.

Apparently to Henry this was a great find, it was various colours of orange and brown with some sprayed gold bits and made up of very exotic dried fruits and seed pods. It was really quite nice to look at and very decorative and most definately not edible.

So Henry ate it. Not quite all of it but about three quarters of a dinner plate full.

I was awoken by him wimpering at the bottom of the stairs followed by the unmistakeable sound of retching. I wasn't too worried, dogs are sick all the time and it seems mostly for no reason so I was instantly shocked to seem several orange patches of sick all over the living room carpet and even a couple up the cream coloured sofas. This was projectile sick in doggie form and it wasn't good.

I let Henry out into the garden and started to clean up the sick. It wasn't cleaning up very well, the sick was coming up (excuse the pun) but the orange dye wasn't. I had orange blobs all over the living room and to make matters worse Henry came in from the garden and was promptly sick once again on the carpet.

I decided the best thing was to not feed Henry for a day and let the pot-pourri work it's way through his system so I dug out one of the big dust sheets to protect what was left of the carpet and kept an eye on him.

He was fine for the rest of the day, rather listless but still interested in food which I saw as a good sign but as the evening wore on he seemed to get more and more ill. It was by now too late to call the vet so I decided to sleep on the sofa downstairs with him until it was time for the vet to open.

By the next morning poor Henry looked very sorry for himself, he was looking very skinny and downtrodden and the vet decided to take him in and keep him at the surgery. He ended up staying for three days. This was a very good lesson in getting your dog insured and I felt releived that that was one of the first things I did when I got Henry.

On the fourth day Henry came home. It looked as though all the weight he'd put on since I'd got him had been lost and we once again had a skinny ribby dog who despite everything he'd managed to put himself through was still bouncing! And eating.....