Just finished watching my Phillies hang on long enough to beat the Marlins, 8-6. Meanwhile, the winds have picked up and sporadic power outages are certain. So thanks, Ms Calabaza, for sending me this quick one…..

Owner Chris Morrison had been taking five-year-old black labrador Oscar round the Pitreavie golf course in Dunfermline for several months. He took Oscar to the vet after noticing a rattling sound coming from his pet’s stomach. They then discovered that 13 balls – each weighing 45 grams – were lodged in his stomach.

“He finds golf balls like truffles. We’re not sure how long exactly this happened over, but it must have been a fair period – several months at least. I felt his stomach and heard them rattling around. He normally brings a few home, but I had no idea he had eaten so many.” [said Morrison] BBC News

Unless Oscar has been neutered, only 2 of his15 total balls remain. That should be enough. My cat Bamboo, neutered 13 years ago, still routinely humps the armchair throw, sometimes dragging it around the house and leaving sprawled for us to find. (We call it “the slut.”) Another failure of Abstinence Only.

photo credit: Marco

Dogs eat anything. Mistress Elizabeth has a lovely golden collie and a fat guinea pig. She often allows the pig to wander around the house — he doesn’t travel far — and one day he trundles across the living room, stopping long enough to deposit a sizable wet brown turd on the tile floor. The collie promptly prances over and slurps it up. Yum.

Our first dog, Jersey, was a heartbreakingly beautiful female Golden Retriever who grew to over 100 pounds, possibly thanks to the broken glass, shards of terracotta pots, eyeglass frames, and occasional bicycle tire she chewed and swallowed. That’s only what we caught. Everybody I know who has a dog has a story about what the damn creatures have eaten or attempted to eat.  Even one another.  Even themselves.

Satchel, the long-suffering but sweet dog in the comic strip Get Fuzzy (which I highly recommend) has his own philosophy about this. “Eat everything,” he advises. “You’d be surprised how much you put in your mouth is actually edible.”

I doubt he has any balls, though, golf or otherwise.

Art by Marco