I try to read a few blogs every now and then, and one I particularly like is Isabella, the Standard Poodle. (She writes a lot better than I do, and my old dog Henry has crush on her! I think he might be a dirty old man!) Check out her early archives - her adventures playing 'drive-by' with the old Pom are priceless.
Anyways, last week she posted a warning about paper shredders, and I wanted to expound on this a bit (I’d been planning to do this for a while and her post reminded me.)
I’ve seen a couple and heard about a lot of paper shredder accidents. Dogs will be dogs (as we’ve discussed here so often), and the paper shredder is just one more thing to investigate. I once saw a dog whose whole tongue was amputated. He was a nice Lab. The owners came home to a really awful blood-bath. The dog was stabilized and transferred to the surgeon at the hospital I was working at the time. There wasn’t much to be done – the tongue was basically gone. A temporary feeding tube was placed (similar to the one in this blog entry about Macy), and he was hospitalized for supportive care for some time. We all got quite attached to him. After a reasonably short period of time, he learned how to drink by dunking his muzzle in the bowl and sucking the water up. He then learned how to eat meatballs by tossing them to the back of his throat to swallow them. He also started giving kisses – he would smush his muzzle up against you instead of lick. It was the coolest thing. His mouth did have a bad odor without the tongue in there cleaning the teeth some, etc., and he drooled a lot. But he did well.
These photos from a colleague in another ER hospital are another less severe but still dramatic incident:
And don’t think it’s just the dogs. I’ve heard of cat tails and paws being stuck in shredders, and I read about one case where a cat was laying on the shredder when it went off and got her side sliced up (she recovered well with treatment).
Moral: Unplug your shredder when not in use. When in use, keep the animals far away!
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