4 month old pup ate a beer cap! - Page 3

Conspicuous, what I've seen happen is this: you're distracted, you leave the room, thinking they're occupied and won't even notice you've left for 30 seconds, and instead, they jump up to look at whatever is on the coffee table, etc. where you'd been sitting and stuff flies everywhere, ending up under furniture. You panic, stuff is missing, money, bottle tops, etc. They look innocent- nothing in their mouths, so you're sure they swallowed it. I have actually never had one swallow something that bad. They fling things everywhere, bat them around, maybe pick them up, but never swallow it. I went so far as to buy a metal detector to ease my mind one time when a quarter was missing. It was not inside the mischief maker, but rather, had landed in a plant. 

So glad you had the same experience I did and all is well! 

GSDsRock:
                My info on the composition of the penny was outdated...(got it from a web site)....

The relevant question is not whether Zn toxicity can kill (yes it can), but what is most likely following ingestion of a beer cap (as opposed to a penny), Zn toxicosis or intestinal obstruction. I would wager that intestinal obstruction on swallowing a beer cap is the major concern.  Yes one can prove almost anything from the internet, Zn toxicosis is possible but not probable following ingestion of a beer cap. 

My pup is male.

A penny for your thoughts..

Guddu, a swallowed beer cap with a high zinc % will cause hemolytic anemia even before it goes down far enough to obstruct--it happens very quickly. And, of course, both obstruction and poisoning can happen. Both dangers are good reasons to get swallowed metal things out ASAP, which I think we agree on.

I wonder how often the "swallowed" item is found on the floor. Not that I would know anything about this personally. Ahem. Don't ask why my most frequent use of a flashlight is inspecting the floor while crawling around on my hands and knees. Not a pretty sight.

OK, your dog is male, but who is he? He's gorgeous! A penny (pre-1982, copper penny) for his pedigree link.

Guddu, very nice pup indeed. I hope you update the photos as he grows. He must stop traffic when you walk him.

I would guess that he bypasses the bottle caps and goes straight for the beer.

My girls are & were fairly discriminate eaters, but oh Beckett tried to give me coronaries & strokes several times! He LOVED any thing that smelled like me, & would scarf objects down before I could pry them out of his steel gripped jaws; including but not limited to...a PAIR of socks, balled together....a hair scrunchy.....an entire stuffed animal....an entire glass of wine (not the glass, thank goodness)....a pen....a little bag I used to take to training that held treats & turned into a water dish. All of these things were passed through his system with out any difficulty. In fact, I only found out about the stuffed animal when Beckett began pooping WHITE FLUFFY poop! OMG, you'd think I was oblivious but I really did watch him, he was & still is very fast! And once he had the object, he would start to gobble the minute I tried to retreive it from him, he was very smart, um, or uh, maybe not! The wine he snuck his nose into while I was on the phone with Shelley R, his momma....LOL! jackie harris  

All's well that ends well! 

guddu, I agree with you as per the degree of risk w/zinc toxicity...but the problem is, too often the dog's owner watches the dog like a hawk for a day or so, and if the dog is still eating, drinking, peeing, pooping and acting OK, the incident is forgotten--sighs of relief abound, no obstructions, hooray!  Meanwhile, the object itself is still lying in the stomach, not passing through the GI tract, and continuing to degrade from the gastric fluid bath.   Basic rule: if a foreign object is suspected of having gone into the dog, it is MANDATORY that the owner confirms that it's come back OUT again...and ALL of it, not just some of it. More than a few tennis-balling swallowing dogs ended up in emergency surgery because the dog's owner thought the dog had vomited all of the pieces up.

This must be why I prefer wine over beer :D

When I worked as a tech we removed some very bizarre objects from dogs' stomaches.The most memorable was a GSD, a K-9, who lost weight and vomited for 2 years. 2,3 vets could not figure out was was wrong with him, not sure why since a ray clearly showed a foreign body in his stomach. Turn out he had swallow whole one of those rubber toys that looked like a porcupine. And then there was the Dobe that swallow 3 choke chains.