Dog owner Tamaki Kano knew something was wrong after taking her dog to the park and letting them play with a tennis ball they found in a Metro Vancouver park.
Stanley, her three-year-old rescue, became violently ill. The symptoms were so severe that she initially thought he might have swallowed a piece of bone. Kano told her story to Kate Webb at Metro News in Vancouver.
“I was in a panic mode…I kind of think of him like a child — like if a child was vomiting for 48 hours, you’re going to do something.”
At the emergency animal clinic, a vet took x-rays of Stanley but found no obstruction. Then, she was talking to another dog owner who has a dog with the same symptoms but was worse off than Stanley. Because the ball the two dogs were playing with was thrown away, there’s no way to get it tested.
The incident was reported to the RCMP and the SPCA’s manager of cruelty investigations.
It’s not the first time there have been suspicions that someone was poisoning balls that would be picked up by dogs. There have been similar reports around Metro Vancouver.
Both dogs have begun to recover from their illness.
Photo credit: Metro News/ Tamaki Kano
