San Diego dog a finalist for nation’s weirdest pet medical claim

Howard, a mischievous golden retriever in San Diego, has been known to chew things up and take the occasional emergency ride to the veterinary hospital.

But Howard’s latest hospital odyssey has qualified him as one of 12 finalists for the 2018 Hambone Award. Presented by Nationwide Insurance, it honors the company’s most bizarre pet insurance claim of the year.

Howard is owned by Aimee Liwanag and Oliver Ashby of San Diego. One morning this past summer, Howard grew impatient for his morning walk with Liwanag. When she walked into another room to take a phone call, he leapt on the kitchen counter and pulled an electronics charger out of an electrical outlet, chewed it up and swallowed part of it.

When Liwanag came back in the room she saw wires protruding from Howard’s mouth and worried that he’d received an electrical shock and could be poisoned by the materials in the charger.

She took him to Bodhi Animal Hospital in North Park where he was induced to vomit up part of the charger and the rest passed through his system naturally.

“Howard has chewed up things in the past, but never something this dangerous,” she said. “I wasn’t sure he had been shocked or not, but I knew he needed medical attention. Thank goodness for pet insurance, because this isn’t the first emergency trip he’s had.”

Howard was named Nationwide’s Hambone finalist for July, which put him in the running for the annual award against 11 other dogs and cats. His competition — chosen by Nationwide from some 1.5 million annual claims — will be fierce.

Among the pets he’s up against are Sugar Cookie, a Siberian cat from North Carolina who took a ride in the fluff cycle of her owner’s clothes dryer; Zia and Zeus, a pair of German shepherds from Washington state who went missing for 22 days and were found in an abandoned missile silo; Dottie, an Irish setter from Pennsylvania who was electrically shocked in a fall into a heated pond; Cheddar, a Labrador mix from Connecticut who was nearly crushed under a falling chandelier; and Bentley, a golden retriever from Massachusetts whose eye was accidentally glued shut by a hot glue gun.

The annual awards were created in 2009 after a dog ate an entire Thanksgiving ham while stuck in a refrigerator. Other past annual winners are Kismet, a Jack Russell terrier who was stabbed while fighting off a home intruder; and Curtis, a boxer who swallowed a barbecue skewer.

The 2010 Hambone winner was also from San Diego. Ellie, a year-old Labrador owned by Robert and Sandra Coe of Santee, won the prize after she ate hundreds of dead bees from a beehive that had been sprayed by exterminators.

The annual winner of the Hambone Award is chosen by public vote online. Voting opened Sept. 25 and runs through Oct. 8. The prize for Howard will be a trophy and a basket of pet toys and treats. The veterinary practice that treated the winner will receive a $10,000 grant devoted to treating pets whose owners can’t afford it.

The winner will be announced Oct. 17.

To vote, visit: hamboneaward.com/hambone-nominees/2018/

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com