Dee wrote, re: styrofoam peanuts:
>Cornstarch peanuts, which will dissolve in water, are perfectly safe.
 
The starch peanuts are undeniably much safer than the foam peanuts, but
"perfectly safe" may be an overstatement.
 
Due to five years of neglect, our girl Tiki had never really figured out
how to play.  The one exception was her box of starch peanuts.  It was
the only toy or thing in the world that she really loved to play with.
She would come out of her cage and run over to the box and jump in.  She
would "swim" around in them, lie on her back on top of them, and burrow
down under them and nap.
 
A year and change ago, because she was getting on in years, a trip to
the vet included a blood test, which showed her glucose was very low.
We went through lists of possible causes and took measures to treat her,
even putting her on prednisone.  Nothing seemed to help significantly.
 
A few months later, things all came together when we were fishing her out
of her box and she came up with half a peanut sticking out of her mouth.
We started watching her more closely, and we saw that while she was under
the surface of the peanuts, she was making small rhythmic movements.  She
was going into the peanuts and eating them.  She must not have just been
chewing one or two, she had to have been scarfing them like cheese puffs.
We tried to dissuade her from eating them, but she would have none of it,
so we had to take her box away.  She was terribly sad, but at least her
glucose levels came back to close to normal.
 
Incidentally, we just lost Tiki to heart disease this Monday morning.  I
would give anything to have her back even for an hour, just to let her
play in those peanuts again.  I hope they have plenty of them at the
Rainbow Bridge.
 
-just another boston-based business
Corey (dad), Andrea (mom), Lucy, Gabriel, ...and one conspicuously empty
bathmat
[Posted in FML issue 3716]