Help!  Gabrielle, our little troublemaker extraordinaire, has lately taken
to eating everything, and I do mean *everything*, she can get her little
paws around.  She's always been one to eat foreign bodies, and when she was
younger she had two blockage surgeries six months apart for eating first
the insole of my tennis shoe, then the great big *hard* rubber stopper off
the steam iron!  But lately we've had so many near misses it is scaring me,
and I don't understand why she's eating these things.  We are so careful
about ferret-proofing, but it just doesn't seem to matter.
 
In the past six weeks she has done the following: first, she got into the
bathroom, which is off limits, and I chased her in and pried her jaws apart
just in time to keep a hair rubber band from going down her little throat.
This happened in the span of about 30 seconds.  Then a few days later she
coughed up some chewed up pink plastic from the ring that comes around the
top of a gallon of milk.  It never occurred to me that she would even *try*
to eat this, so we'd been giving them to the cat as a toy.  Third, she was
choking again and a piece of tortilla chip (don't ask me how she got it)
had to be removed from her throat with tweezers.  Next, the tweezers came
out again when she choked on an old claw that the cat had shed!  And
finally, tonight, I caught her chewing up a *pencil tip* which must've
fallen on the floor accidentally and we had to get it out of her throat
with the tweezers again.
 
The little nitwit is going to kill herself!
 
-Tasha
[Posted in FML issue 2981]