Labrador Retriever Disease

L for Labrador Retriever Disease

I have never bought pet insurance. I’ve kind of thought that it was a waste of money. But after the emergency trip to the vet hospital a couple of weeks ago, I am reconsidering.

We got a beautiful black labrador retriever puppy from our friends at Tully Brook Farm at the end of the summer last year. Her name is Maggie.

It has been almost 15 years since we have had a puppy and I think I repressed a lot of the difficulty of having a puppy: sharp pointy teeth, house training, various household items torn apart, the shredding of all my plants when I left him alone.

Since Maggie has been in our lives, those memories have returned. But I don’t quite remember the chewing/eating thing being so bad with Mr. Beasley, our first puppy (he’s a beagle).

Maggie eats everything! Here’s a list of the non-food items she has eaten:

Plastic forks/spoons/knives
Wooden cooking spoons
A roll of saran wrap
Rolls of toilet paper, wrapping paper, paper towels, boxes of tissues
Hot wheels monster trucks
Caps: milk caps, bottled water caps, caps to our sports bottles
The dining room table legs
3 library books
Tubes of toothpaste
Toothbrushes
Shoes
Bottle of Elmer’s glue
Pencils and pens
Sticks and rocks
My favorite Ove Gloves (just the thumbs, but they are unusable without those)
Mittens and hats
Her dog bed
More socks than I can count (she literally pulls them off Number 5’s feet)
Underwear
A bottle of fluoride tablets (precipitated trip to hospital)

My vet would be appalled if he knew the true nature of her diet.

Just so you know, most of these are not just lying around our house. She can reach almost all the surfaces in our house, so unless it is behind a door, it is not safe from Maggie.

At one of her checkups after the fluoride incident, I said to the vet, “I can’t believe the things she eats!” The vet looked at me with a slight look of disbelief and said, “She has labrador retriever disease. Didn’t you know? They do eat everything.”

I’ve heard of a lot of the finer points of labs: good family dogs, on the smarter side, all around good at obedience and dog sports, little to no aggression.

But I was unaware of labrador retriever disease!