While on vacation in Santa Barbara, kristy and I had a bit of a scare with one of our dogs back in Kansas City. Since our house is on the market, inevitably we had four showings while we were out of town. Each time the house was shown, our house/dog sitter had to gather up the pups and get them out of the house for an hour or so. On Saturday she called and asked if it would be OK to take them to her place since we had two showings back to back lasting a couple of hours. We had no issue with it. We even said it’ll be a big adventure for Cosmo and Zoe to ride in the car and see a new place. For Cosmo, the adventure almost cost him his life.

Cosmo is a chow hound, and a very inquisitive little rat terrier mix. The house sitter has a small problem with mice at her place. Mice means traps or poison. Poison looks and smells like food. Cosmo’s walnut sized brain can’t tell the difference. The result… Cosmo ate rat poison, and had to go to the emergency vet. Thankfully the sitter caught him right away so he only ingested a small amount. Thankfully the emergency vet was less than five minutes from her place. They caught it in time and managed to neutralize the poison before it killed him. That said though, he’s not totally out of the woods. It will take up to four weeks before things are all clear.

Rat poisons work in three different ways. One kind causes violent seizures that cause the animal to spasm to death with violent convulsions as the nervous system fails. The second kind causes kidney failure. The third, the kind Cosmo ate, causes internal hemorrhaging so the animal bleeds to death internally as its organs fail.

The treatment for the third if caught in time is pretty straightforward. Pump the stomach, neutralize with fluids, charcoal, and vitamin K, wait and see. It takes about 48 hours to know what is going to happen, and because the poison creates hemorrhaging it leaves the animal in a state where they bruise and bleed easily for up to four weeks after the treatment. For the next month Cosmo will take daily doses of vitamin K, he’s not allowed to play or rough house with other dogs, and has to avoid any activity that could cause bleeding, or bruising. The good news is he’s alive. He made it without serious complications, and it looks like he’s going to be around for a long time.

Cosmo will now be known as Cosmo the Wonder Dog.