Animals have a way of getting into trouble and it’s not always their intention.
They’re constantly looking for food and they can usually differentiate between food and something else.
However, sometimes, when they’re starving, they just gobble up whatever it is they find.
Another problem is how humans treat the environment, and many times, an animal ends up with garbage in its stomach because of pollution.
COIN’S IN A TURTLE’S STOMACH
Tossing coins into a fountain to bring good luck is a popular superstition, but the practice brought misery to a sea turtle in Thailand from which vets have removed 915 coins.
Vets in Bangkok operated on the 25-year-old female green sea turtle nicknamed Bank, whose indigestible diet was the result of tourists seeking good fortune by tossing coins into her pool over many years in the eastern town of Sri Racha.
Many Thais believe that throwing coins on turtles will bring longevity.
But the coins eventually formed a 5kg ball in Bank’s stomach. The weight cracked her ventral shell, causing a life-threatening infection.
Five surgeons from Chulalongkorn University’s veterinary faculty removed the coins over four hours while Bank was anesthetized.
The ball was too big to take out through a 10cm incision, so it had to be removed a few coins at a time. Many of them had corroded or partially dissolved.
The result was satisfactory. Now it’s up to Bank to see how much she can recover.
The turtle, recovering in the university’s animal hospital, will be on a liquid diet for the next two weeks.
Typically, a green sea turtle has a lifespan of about 80 years.
43 SOCKS IN GREAT DANE
Socks. They’re just not for feet anymore. Apparently, they make pretty tasty snacks too, if you’re not too discriminating and you happen to be a 3-year-old Great Dane. Just don’t eat too many.
And by too many, 43 would be a good example. When they opened up his stomach and kept removing sock after sock of all different shapes and sizes, the Vets could not believe the number of socks in the dogs’ stomach.
Is there anything our pets won’t eat? The super-sized pooch had shown a hankering for socks before, but the extent of the problem wasn’t apparent until he got sick and the X-rays showed the contents of his belly.
Oh, and those X-rays even impressed the experts. The vet clinic submitted them to the annual “They Ate what?” contest at Veterinary Practice News and won the $500 third prize.
The Great Dane is doing just fine. He was home a day after his surgery.
