Daily Archives: Saturday, 26 May, 2007

A month ago I was still skiing, and today I had my first swim. Welcome to Québec, where winter right goes into summer.

The water wasn’t very cold, I’m not a hardened swimmer. It was just nice to cool off after the walk. Poupoune also went in, so she was definately feeling much better.

Loglog almost killed Poupoune.

During a walk in the forest Poupone disturbed a big toad that hopped from the path into the leaves alongside the path. After the first hop, the toad played dead and Poupoune couldn’t find it, even though it was right in front of her. Apparently toads don’t have much of a body odour.

I wanted to take a picture of both the toad and Poupoune for loglog, so I took my camera out of my backpack and aimed. But then the toad moved again, and Poupoune, very close now, grabbed it. She started shaking her head ferociously and both Alison and I thought it was an ex-toad. But the toad was already far away. The real reason Poupoune was shaking her head so violently was that she had her mouth full of toad poison.

She immediately started foaming from her mouth, licking her lips, and then trying to throw up. But not much came out of her, just some white foam. I tried to give her some water, but she wouldn’t drink. We went along but she kept vomiting foam and later some bile. She also started to have diarrhoea in the brightest green I’ve ever seen. After we had a rest and she vomited a couple of more times we went back to the car.

Alison was very worried, but I even made jokes like “I guess Pepe is going to outlive her”. Anyway, as you might have guessed, she survived, otherwise you would have found an obit here.

When we were near the car she was almost her old self again. She went into a puddle and drank some water and smiled again with her big happy smile.

When we went home I googled for ‘dog poisoned by toads’ and found we’ve been lucky. If we had lived in the American Mid-West or in Australia the toads would have been much more poisonous, and Poupoune might not have survived the ordeal.

I hope she has learned from this but I fear she hasn’t. She is, after all, a hunting dog. Well her terrier part, Chihuahuas don’t hunt, they just yap.