38-year-old Elayna Rattenbury and her husband Dave had to experience the unfortunate event of having to wait four days and sift through piles of dog doo to find Elayna’s engagement ring after their pet, Stevie, ate the ring off the table.
Elayna said she was home one afternoon when she left the bedroom door open and their seven-month-old Labrador, Stevie, snuck into the room. According to the pet owner, the dog had a thing for tissues and when Dave went back into the room, tissues were strung out all over.
Elayna told Mirror UK, “I went to see the mess she’d caused and immediately realised the ring was not there. It was a heart-stopping moment. Then I looked at Stevie and thought, ‘She hasn’t, surely she hasn’t?’ But oh yes, she had.”
After searching in the room and not finding the ring, Elayna and Dave decided the best thing to do is take Stevie to Linnaeus-owned Brentknoll Veterinary Centre in Worcester and get an X-Ray to confirm if she had eaten it.
The veterinarian quickly got down to the bottom of the problem and found the ring inside the dog’s belly, so there was a real sense of relief in knowing that at least the ring was not lost.
Vet Annelies De Vos said, “As you can see from the X-rays, Stevie had definitely eaten the owner’s ring but, luckily for her, we could see the ring had not caused any internal damage and would pass through naturally within a few days.”
The problem now was getting the ring out of Stevie’s tummy and after investigating the situation, the vet said the ring was too far down for them to retrieve it.
The only solution at this point was to let nature takes its course, and let the ring pass through Stevie until she pooped it out.
Elayna told Mirror UK, “I took her home and for the next four days I was rooting through her poo trying to find it. I’d expected to find it in the first 24 hours, so by day three I was thinking I must have missed it and started searching back through the poo bags from previous days. My husband Dave even bought a metal detector to try to find it and then, thankfully, on day four, it finally appeared.”
Elayna explained that the ring obviously wasn’t looking its best, so she put it on a tub of hot soapy water for two days. Every few hours she would take the ring out, rise it off and scrub it down with a toothbrush.
“It certainly needed a good soaking and scrubbing before I dared even smell it, let alone put it back on.”
After extensive cleaning, the ring was finally back on her finger, safe and sound, where it belongs.