January 8th Puppy Emergency!

It is never good to be awakened at 2am by a panicked voice of your spouse. Even worse when that voice is warbling/sobbing "Honey! We have a puppy emergency! I think Squeaker is going to die!"

Instantly awake and full of adrenalin, I throw on my robe and run out to the kitchen where Jim is shakily holding a puppy in distress!

Now to understand the situation, the puppy in question was not Squeaker after all, but Elvis. Elvis is a smart boy (this whole litter has amazed me with thier intelligence), and saw that Jim had left an open treat jar on the table bench. He somehow managed to knock the jar to the floor and slide his head through a considerably tight fit into the jar (plastic jar thank goodness). The tight fit was enough to limit the airflow to the point of possible suffocation. Once his head was inside and his ears back forward, the jar was not coming back off intact. Elvis was suffocating!

First thing I did was grab a serated paring knife and cut off the bottom of the jar so he could breathe. Elvis immediately calmed as he took in gulps of fresh air, but he was such a good guy he did not whine once after I appeared on scene.

The next puzzle was how to free him from this "cone of shame" (pardon my quote here, but it is sooo appropriate). Jim cleared off the hobby table and brought some rag towels and the bottle of vegetable oil as I requested, and I set poor Elvis on the table and began pouring oil around the jar so that it leaked down to his neck without dripping on his face. Once he was good and lubed up, we tried to shimmy the jar off to no avail. I began to wonder just how he had gotten his head in there in the first place!

Even covered with oil, Elvis was a trooper and bore it all with as much dignity as the cone of shame would let him. Not one whine out of him the whole time we worked to free him until almost the very end.

The only way I could figure to get him out would be to cut the jar away from him. This proved to be a job that wire cutters and scissors were inadequate for. The plastic screw on lip of the jar was too thick and too hard to cut. Jim tried the small metal nippers to no avail, but I thought perhaps my large horse nail cutting nippers would work. The only problem with nippers, though, is you need to make a larger opening because of the limited width of them. So for close to a half an hour we whittled away at the lip of the jar with the metal nippers until we finally made it through the thick part. Heavy duty scissors made it through the rest of the jar and I gently bent it enough that we were able to pull it off from Elvis. He was just beginning to whine ever so softly, wondering if we were going to be able to save him, and suddenly he was free.

He was so happy, but so needed reassurance. I held him for twenty minutes before he felt safe enough to leave my side, all the while I wiped oil from his fur. After that, he was his usual happy-go-lucky self.

Later, I learned it was the original Elvis Prestley's birthday today. What kind of coincidence is that?