Pet vitamin mix-up messes up pets and confuses owners

Dog and cat vitamins don't mix. Feline Katzenjammer, spoils her 230-pound St. Bernard, Brutus, with all the best that money can buy. Feline, a long time lover of pets, lives in a modest home with a large yard for Brutus to romp and play. Brutus has many toys including a 4 x 4 fence post for a fetching stick, a dried cow's leg for a chewing toy and an elephant's ear that Brutus loves to toss in the air and catch. "These toys are expensive but something a big dog like Brutus needs," said Feline, adding, "and Brutus gets nothing but the best."

Recently a mix up in pet vitamins caused quite a series of problems with her XXX large version of man's best friend. Feline did not read the label, but assumed the company sending the vitamins, a company with which she has had many years of online, problem-free purchasing, sent a different brand with an unfamiliar label. Her mistake was not reading the label because she trusted the company had simply sent an alternative brand. After ordering vitamins and toys for Brutus for many years, a simple fulfillment mistake sent cat vitamins to Feline and, ultimately, Brutus. One might think that a vitamin is a vitamin, but not so with pets. Feline, like most pet owners, would never have suspected specific vitamins affect different animals, until Brutus displayed uncanny un-canine behavior after one day of ingesting the new vitamins.

After a typical day of work, at Caesar's Pizza, Feline returned home to find huge mounds of dirt throughout the yard. Brutus had dug up small trees and plants in the process of depositing very large tirds in the holes he created, and then covered them like a cat. Usually Brutus barks at any noise, including Feline, when she comes home after work, but Brutus hissed at her, and nimbly jumped up on the six foot high wooden-railed fence. When she let him in the house, part of their homecoming and feeding routine, he darted after a mouse under the sofa, sending the sofa up and crashing down on a lamp and end table. When she sat down to ponder Brutus' unusual behavior he leaped into her lap. The slobbering and drowning that accompanies close contacts with big dogs like a St Bernard is not something anyone looks forward to, even when the loving, gentle giant purrs like a kitten. Feline was especially worried when, later that night, Brutus refused to lie at the foot of the bed, preferring instead to curl up around Feline's throat, almost smothering her. After a difficult struggle to remove Brutus from her face (Feline weighs 110 pounds). She tried to get Brutus out of the house and into the back yard, directing him with her hips and hands, when he swallowed the cat and stole his catnip, frolicking, and tumbling through the screen door on his way out. A St Bernard has very long, thick fur, so the rose thorns did not affect Brutus on a catnip induced pussy-high as he rolled and tossed the catnip mouse in the bushes.
The unmistakable clue that something was wrong arose when Brutus fell out of a tree chasing a robin.

See next week's follow up, "When aberrant cat behavior reveals the truth about cats and dogs.

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