Sophie might talk about what dogs eat, and when they eat it, and how they eat it. But I think the bigger question is WHY they eat it?
Why do dogs eat things that aren’t supposed to be edible?
Take dryer sheets. I had a patient that would careen through a relative’s front door, race down the hallway and gobble up dryer sheets before anyone could stop them. What drives that behavior? Are the wires in that dog’s brain loose? Or are they tighter than your average dog’s and somehow they just KNOW that they should eat dryer sheets. It’ll make their hair fluffy. They smell good. Mice won’t come into their beds because supposedly mice hate the smell of dryer sheets.
Or do they do it because they’re not supposed to? Like a petulant two-year-old.
“Honey, when we get to Aunt Lucy’s, don’t stomp your feet. You’ll wake the baby.”
Stomp. Stomp.
“Honey, I said NO. Do NOT stomp your feet.”
Stomp. Stomp.
“If you stomp your foot one more time, you are in big trouble. “
Stomp.
If toddlers stomp their feet simply because they have been told not to, do dogs also race to consume dryer sheets just because they have been told not to? Does being denied something suddenly make it more valuable?
If the owner said, “Oh, you want dryer sheets? Here. Have eight. No, don’t stop eating them. Eat more. Eat more.” Would this make the dryer sheet lose value for the dog?
Can humans figure out the allure? Is it the smell? Is it the texture? Is it just because forbidden fruit tastes better, even if it isn’t a fruit? Or isn’t even anything reasonably considered edible. Just because you can EAT it doesn’t put it in the edible category. Edible things should actually be INTENDED to be eaten. Am I right? Edible is “fit to be eaten for food”.
So, can dryer sheets be considered “eatable?” Eatable is “something that has some level of acceptable flavor.” The question, of course, is acceptable to whom? Certainly not to an owner. A dryer sheet could only come with the flavor of something that would taste like doing chores, folding laundry, and cleaning the house. And that is NOT acceptable.
The “some level of acceptable flavor”, if being interpreted by a dog, certainly opens up the category to all kinds of questionable things. Horse feces on the trail. Rabbit droppings under a bush. Flattened squirrels on the edge of the road. The SOME LEVEL would mean to most of us the LEVEL OF A DOG.
If dogs think they understand the definition of “eatable’, then it would be helpful if they also understood ‘digestible’.
A pile of Horse Apples is eatable (disgusting, but eatable), and would also be mostly digestible, give or take a bout of diarrhea or vomiting it up in the back of the SUV on the way home from the hike.
A mouthful of dryer sheets, however, even if we give a very broad definition to ‘eatable’ as being able to be prehended into your mouth and swallowed, are not digestible. Dryer sheets will do one of two things.
They will, with the help of some gastric juices and bile, twist into a thin, elongated piece of white ingesta (which, don’t forget, meant it was INGESTED but doesn’t mean it is DIGESTIBLE) and will twist and turn and eventually find its way out the rectum and onto the lawn, where you will then come along with your pooper scoop and your Target bag to do your weekly pick-up duty, and will say “OMIGOSH! She ate another dryer sheet! Here it is in the poop.” That’s one scenario and, luckily for most dogs, the most common when it comes to something the size of a dryer sheet.
The other scenario is the dog swallows down a hefty mouthful of dryer sheets and - due to bad luck and poor guidance by the rugal folds of the stomach – the sheets bunch up and are compressed into an orb the size and consistency of a paper mache planet on the sixth-grade science fair table.
The planet – let’s call it Mars – rolls around in the stomach for several hours, becoming more and more compressed but only moderately distending the stomach.
Eventually, the stomach is sick of Mars orbiting the opening to the small intestine and orders everything in the stomach lumen to move on down the line. “OUT! Everybody OUT! Time to head into the duodenum,” and the pylorus pushes and shoves the mass of dryer sheets into an intestinal tube that was never made to accommodate a planet as big as Mars. Now, luckily the duodenum has expandable walls and it stretches and strains to make room for Mars, but the planet is so much bigger than the usual morsel passing through that all the little neurons that innervate this part of the intestinal tract are stretched to their limit and start complaining to the Big Guy upstairs.
“What the heck is going on down there?!” the Big Guy hollers, then orders the circulatory system to ramp it up and dilate the vessels around the duodenum so that the white blood cells can get in to see if they can help. The cytokines tumble over themselves to also race to the area, and all that inflammation gets the sensory nerves even more worked up. They scream up to the brain that it is a SHIT SHOW down here and the entire body needs to realize what is happening and do something to help. The brain freaks out because the intestinal nerves are so upset, and tells the feet to either start pacing the floor, or the mouth to go pant in an owner’s face, or the body to hide under a bed while every system tries to figure out a way to help Mars through the intestinal tract.
For hours and hours the peristaltic activity continues, constricting and relaxing, constricting and relaxing, trying to move the stubborn planet through the system. The Big Guy is in full battle gear, and commands that nobody is eating, nobody is drinking, and nobody is defecating until the problem of Mars is solved. The back hunches, trying to guard and make room for the area of inflammation in the abdomen. The pupils dilate with pain, the salivary ducts drip with nausea, and the tail takes a hiatus from joy as the rest of the body focuses on the duodenum.
Finally, the owner sees the dog hiding under the bed and calls the vet clinic. The x-ray is taken. The IV fluids are started and the surgery room is prepped. The technician calls her husband and tells him she won’t be home in time for the kids’ school concert.
“Another foreign body surgery,” she says.
An incision is made on the antimesenteric aspect of the duodenum. The retrieval (“It looks like a paper mache ball!”) and the closing. Mars is put in a Ziplock bag and saved for the owner so they can have in their possession a wad of dryer sheets that is now worth more than both the cost of the washer and dryer together.
"I wish I knew why she keeps eating dryer sheets," the owner says as she stares at Mars.
So do I, my friend. So do I.
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