It’s one of the oldest excuses known to man, perhaps even pre-dating man’s willingness to share a home with dogs. But every once in a while it’s true: The dog DID eat something critical.
Seattle resident Russ Berkman came home from work one day and found some tiny scraps of paper and elastic on the floor. A minute’s worth of detective work confirmed that the scraps were all that was left of four tickets to the 2012 Masters (golf) Tournament in Augusta, Georgia – and that the culprit was his Swiss Mountain Dog, Sierra.
After what was sure to be at least a few minutes of mourning the loss of the tickets – which he bought after winning the opportunity to do so in a ticket lottery Berkman called his girlfriend to tell her that their trip to Georgia was off. She was the one who suggested administering a bit of hydrogen peroxide to Sierra, in hopes that the dog would vomit the tickets up. With at least $1,200 worth of once-in-a-lifetime tickets at stake, Berkman gave it a try. And Sierra did vomit up a glob of paper pulp.
Well, once you’ve gone that far, you have to finish the project. Berkman carefully rinsed the scraps he found in the pile of vomit, and laid the pieces out on paper towels, reconstructing the tickets like a puzzle. It took him, he said, “about three cocktails” worth of time. About 30 percent of the tickets were lost to Sierra’s digestion, but there was enough of the tickets left to convince the Augusta National Golf Club ticket office that Berkman did, in fact, have enough of the tickets in his possession to ensure that he had, in fact, a legitimate excuse to require the printing of a replacement set of tickets.
Photos of the dog, the vomit, and the reconstructed tickets can be found on the Website of sports talk radio station KJR, which interviewed Berkman on the air.
http://www.sportsradiokjr.com/pages/Mitch_in_the_Morning.html?article=9985184
