‘This is Cecil. He has never done anything bad in his life until he ate $4,000.’

[OverandOnward]

(gift article, visible for a month)

“He was shouting, ‘Cecil ate $4,000!’” Carrie recalled about that Dec. 8 afternoon.

“I ran in, thinking I had to have heard him wrong, but when I saw the mess, there was no doubt,” she said. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Cecil had really done it.”

‘This is Cecil. He has never done anything bad in his life until he ate $4,000.’

Oh Cecil …

Some excerpts. The whole article is amusingly written.

“Cecil’s a goofy guy and he’s very particular — you could leave a steak on the table, and he wouldn’t touch it because he’s not food motivated,” said Carrie, 33. “But apparently he is money motivated.”

They called the bank …

“I felt like a kid who says, ‘The dog ate my homework,’” she said. “I was surprised when they said they’d seen similar things happen multiple times — that maybe dogs liked the particular smells on money.”

“Cecil was sitting on the sofa full of $2,500, and we knew there was only one way to get that money back,” Carrie said.

After the Pittsburgh City Paper wrote about what happened, Carrie said she snuggled up next to Cecil and read the piece to him as a bedtime story.

“We couldn’t be mad at him — he’s a very lovable dog,” she said. “People often tell us there’s a human trapped inside our dog.”

“We’ve kept at least one of the torn-up bills so we can do a piece of artwork and frame it to commemorate the entire situation,” Carrie said.

“Not that we’d ever forget,” she quickly added.

What’s the craziest thing that one of your pets ever ate, that you would miss?

What did you do about it?

[JBCool]

All I can think of is the MAS*H episode where Klinger’s goat eats the payroll

[NaturallyHappy]

I know someone whose goat ate a customer’s BMW convertible top😀.

[JBCool]

Oh, NO!!

[Jarpur]

One of our American Water Spaniels really liked twenty dollar bills, but the most he ever ate at one time was $40.

He also took a chomp out of a library book – one bite on the corner clear through a number of pages. Looked exactly like what it was, could see the shape of his mouth and where individual teeth cut the paper – not torn or raggedy edges, almost looked like a faked dog bite. Took that book back to the library, said our dog ate the book, and paid the fine for damaging the book. The librarian was not amused.

He was a dog we’d adopted through AWS Rescue when he was five years old, and he came with a few quirks.

[OverandOnward]

Who (else) wonders if, at some deep cross-species level, Cecil was attempting to re-balance the household dynamics, after the new human addition had so drastically restricted his house rights?

I’m not saying the Cecil understood what eating $4,000 meant to his owner’s discretionary budget. Just that, in a doggy way, he knew that the stack of cash left on the counter had a lot of meaning to the lords of the household.

So there, y’all, I ate it, and now you can think about that.

[shiloh]

Well, Bonnie did not eat money but she loved to take it and hide it. I lost a $20 bill once (was heartbroken because it was all I had) and could not find it for about a year. One day I decided to pull out the kitchen table/computer desk and there it was where she had stashed it with her little paws. I would find paper money everywhere - I had to learn I could not leave any of out anywhere. She would find it and hide it.

[OverandOnward]

Oh my. I wonder if there really is a smell to money that fascinates dogs. Or maybe it’s that so mamy people have handled it.

And being a dog, if something is interesting, the thing to do is eat it. Because you never know until you try (if you’re a dog).

[Renn_aissance]

I grew up with Humphrey. He was a Golden with pica. He did a lot of bad in his life. But he never ate $4000.

He did eat a Costco-sized jar of Vaseline once. Jar included. That was simultaneously the most and least problematic of his questionable choices. Least, because the nature of Vaseline is that there was no risk of impaction. Most, because he did this two days after my mother had just gotten new WHITE carpet…

[DiamondJubilee]

Oh I had a lab that ate my cash, and a book of stamps at the same time. I left my rent cash on my bench in my hall with a book of stamps, and it was gone in a few hours. Not a trace of the envelope of cash or the 10 stamps.

He pooped out parts of $20 bills for days. He was famous for eating things and I’m so surprised he never needed surgery. The list that I knew of was socks, so many socks - I would find those in his poop. Several dog beds and toys. baseboard, a glass Christmas ornament, a DVD, a remote car starter and his most famous was our remote controller for the TV. He literally pooped out buttons and pieces of the electronics every day for a week. He lived a great age of 14 and thankfully stopped eating everything around him by the age of 2.

I’m so grateful my new girl (now over 2) never really ate anything.

[endlessclimb]

I was sitting downstairs when I heard what sounded like potato chips crunching in the formal living room.

That sound was our youngest vizsla, who I love to PIECES, eating one side of my very sentimental $600 floor lamp that my dad bought for my sister and I. It was artisan made, hand pressed leaves.

It now lives in the basement, as I haven’t figured out 1) how to repair it and 2) where a safe place for it is.

You can kind of see it here, in the listing photos from when I sold my Indiana house.

[Mango20]

My dog has separation anxiety and steals things to deal with that. Usually, it’s not destructive, and her recent favorite is to get the corn meal (regular bag inside a zip-lock bag) from inside the lazy susan cabinet and just take it to the living room. She never opens it, and that’s the case most of the time. However, one day she took and opened a bottle of canola oil, all over the carpet. It has never recovered. It’s old and in need of replacement anyway, but now has a weird, flat, brownish circle on it until I get around to replacing it.

Now all my oils are kept somewhere else.

[MunchingonHay]

I used to work at a boarding kennel and we had a weekend warrior GSP that would come nearly every weekend and Rocky would leave with; sunglass, washclothes (whole), socks, the TV remote, plastic bits, wooden bits, … it never ended.

[AllSport]

Wait, I want to know why they had $4k in cash laying around in the first place. I’m not a subscriber so I couldn’t read the article. That’s far more fascinating to me than the fact that the dog ate it.

[Simkie]

The link at the top is a gift article, you don’t need a subscription to read it

They had that sum in cash because the owners had a fence installed, and the contractor wanted to be paid in cash.

[OverandOnward]

“I just set it down for a minute” will be the husband’s story, I’m sure.

Apparently he came in with his stash all bundled up for the contractor, and left it on the kitchen counter.

They are claiming that Cecil didn’t steal food or anything off the kitchen counter. Just this particular bundle of cash. That had only been there a short time. Oh Cecil.

Just thinking, sometimes, a pet will rain some destruction down on something particularly sensitive, at exactly the wrong time. “They never did anything like that before.” I do think that a pet who is feeling some kind of way about something can be alert for a chance to express their displeasure. I think it is not a coincidence that Cecil’s privileges were bumped down a notch when the baby arrived, even though the arrival was some time ago. Just sayin.

[Christa_P]

Maybe Cecil was mad about the fence