We Demand A Recount For The Winners Of The 2014 X-Ray Contest For Animals

In this month’s issue of Veterinary Practice News, the most horrifying and heart-stopping nightmares of every pet owner are on full display, and the results are simply HILARIOUS. The publication is the host of the annual “They Ate WHAT?” competition, which allows people to submit the very real x-rays of their pets’ most ridiculous trips to the vet in the past year. As we all know, man’s best friends, whether dog, cat or even reptile, love to eat just about anything that they can get their funny little mouths on, even if it could possibly kill them, because HAHAHA they don’t know the damn difference.

The winner of this year’s contest is a frog named Kermit from Plano, Texas, as the little bug-muncher decided to feast on the rocks in its tank and ended up with a belly full of 30 pebbles, while his owner was left to foot the surgical bill. Look, I get the whole bond between a human and his pet, because I love my pooch like no other, but there are frogs everywhere. Like, if Kermit had not made it through that meal from hell, I could have gone outside and just picked up another Kermit and tried again. But I suppose that’s also an insensitive way to look at it, and I certainly mean no disrespect to Kermit and his family, as their x-ray won them a whopping $1,500.

Still, I can’t help but think that the third-place recipient of a $500 prize was robbed. The unnamed 3-year old Great Dane from Portland, Oregon was treated at the DoveLewis Emergency Animal Hospital for a “severely distended stomach and a large quantity of foreign material,” according to Veterinary News Practice, and the x-ray revealed what looked like the cloudy formation of the animal kingdom’s antichrist.

Pretty spooky, right? I’d freak out if my dog’s stomach looked like a freshly-poured Irish car bomb. Fortunately, it turned out that the “foreign material” was just some socks. Forty-three and one-half socks, to be exact.

At what point does the pet owner stop and think, “Hey, I think I’m missing some socks”? I’d love to explore that further, but in the meantime, $500 will sure by that person a lot of new socks, if he’s not content to simply wash those that were pulled from the giant dog’s stomach. Amazingly, though, this isn’t my pick for the biggest highway robbery of this delightfully strange competition.

Instead, the pet that didn’t even crack the Top 3 and could have made an amazing case for the grand prize is a 10-month-old, 58-pound golden retriever named Cody, who was treated by the Golf Rose Animal Hospital in Schaumburg, Illinois. Go ahead and see if you can figure out what it was that Cody swallowed. It’s a tough one.

The most impressive thing about this? With a little help from the vet, Cody pooped out a full light bulb. There are professional magicians who can’t pull off a trick as remarkable as that! Honorable mention or not, Cody has our respect today, as I imagine that he looked a little something like this after he passed that bulb…

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