Dog Swallows 5 Golf Balls, Forced to Get Surgery

A stock photo of a golf ball. Wojciech Kulicki/CC BY 2.0

A dog in the United Kingdom was forced to undergo surgery to remove several golf balls from its stomach.

Rebecca Miles, the owner of a Springer Spaniel named Louis, said the dog ate five golf balls over the course of several months before major surgery was conducted to remove the objects, reported the Daily Mail.

Miles said her dog began throwing up and lost a significant amount of weight before she took him to a veterinarian.

When X-ray results came back, five balls were seen lodged in the animal’s stomach, she said.

“When he initially became ill, we changed his food and became much stricter with his diet,” she told SWNS, reported Fox News. “He always seemed lethargic at home but when we took him out for walks he was his usual bouncy self. When he continued being sick, we took him back to the vet.”

She and the dog went for daily walks at a golf course in Birmingham in the Midlands. She noticed the dog was picking up the golf balls with its mouth, but she said the animal would drop then when ordered.

“I never imagined he accidentally swallowed some of them,” she told SWNS.

After the X-ray revealed the spherical objects in Louis’s stomach, she knew what they were.

Vet Emily Moss performed surgery on the dog, describing it as “incredibly lucky.”

The dog is expected to make a full recovery.

“I knew they would be golf balls. It’s a relief to get to the bottom of it, have them removed and see Louis making a recovery,” Miles told the Mirror.

“They showed up on the X-ray immediately and looked like ping pong balls but we could also see they were very dense,” Moss told the tabloid. “When Rebecca mentioned they often walk around the golf course, it suggested only one thing.”

She added, “It’s one of the most unusual cases I’ve ever seen and is on a par with a dog that I once operated on who had swallowed an entire bum bag.”

There have been other cases of dogs around the world ingesting several golf balls before surgeons were forced to remove them.

A German Shepherd named Murphy swallowed six before surgery, according to a 2015 BBC report.

“There were some foreign bodies inside his stomach but the vets couldn’t identify what they were, so Westway operated at their hospital and saved his life,” David Larson, the dog’s owner, told the broadcaster. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard he had swallowed six golf balls.”

“I’ve only had him for 18 months and he has never come into contact with golf balls during that time, so they must have been lodged inside him for a long time,” he said, adding that he got sick after eating a bone.

In a more extreme case, a Doberman swallowed 26 golf balls. In 2015, Veterinary Practice News posted its “X-Ray Contest Winners,” which included the Doberman as well as a Labrador that had somehow swallowed a fishing pole.

“A 10-week-old stray Labrador retriever presented for lethargy and drooling. He had been tested the night before for parvovirus—it was negative—and he was referred for hospitalization and continual care. A radiograph showed the end of a fishing pole, which was removed after light sedation. The puppy fully recovered,” it said.

Another dog swallowed an entire hinge, according to the website.