Monday, July 28, 2014
I had intended to write about the recent demonstrations in Paris and its suburbs, but Beau stole center stage this afternoon by swallowing rat poison left in the cellar by the former owners of the house.
I have found plastic sealed packets of rat poison in different parts of the house, but never noticed any in the "cave", where I do the laundry. Beau followed me down and while I was putting clothes in the washing machine, found two packets of the poison. When I turned around, I caught him investigating a packet that was partly open, the pink block of poison still inside. I grabbed it immediately, but then my eye fell on another plastic wrapper, empty.
The next couple of hours went by very quickly. Not being able to reach Dr. Marc Mougin, our vet, I called the Carcassonne Animal Hospital. They told me it would be necessary to wait 48 hours before a blood test could be done to determine whether the poison (which kills by creating blood clots) had been ingested. They would be very anxious hours, for sure, so I tried Dr. Mougin's number again and was able to get through.
"Bring him in: we'll induce vomiting. Bang on the door, I'm in my office until 7 p.m.."
I arrived with Beau in tow within the hour. Dr. Mougin injected an emetic between Beau's shoulder blades, and within five minutes Beau was vomiting, first the food he had eaten minutes before he went down to the basement, but also part of the morning's meal --and a red substance that looked like the poison. And two good-sized pebbles.
As Beau will put anything in his mouth, I asked Dr. Mougin what I could do to try to keep Beau from inadvertently injuring, or even killing himself.
"He has 'pica' --ingesting items that are not food. How old is he?"
"He'll be eleven months at the end of this month."
"Well, if he hasn't been operated for 'pica', then it is likely that he will grow out of it", he said with a smile. "Most dogs with the syndrome swallow something that leads to a surgery, so if you haven't had to go that route, things look good. I had to operate on a big dog that cracked open an electrical adapter and ate everything inside. On the X-ray I could only see that what was in his stomach was a large mass. When I showed the X-ray to the owner, he said "Oh that's the adapter I was missing!"
Thursday Beau returns to Dr. Mougin's office, when he will be tested to see whether there are any traces of the poison in his bloodstream. Beau, while initially exhausted from the effects of the emetic, is now his frisky self again. Tomorrow (which happens to be the day my cleaner is coming) I'll make a thorough search of the cave and garage areas for any remaining poison packets.
***
Last week's unauthorized demonstration in Sarcelles, a suburb of Paris, ended in violence, arrests and a Molotov cocktail thrown into a neighborhood synagogue. Government officials deplored the anti-semitic turn pro-Palestinian demonstrations took, but subsequent demonstrations have been no less inflammatory. What is interesting is that joining the left-leaning militants now are young, relatively affluent muslims, or "bobo-muslims" for whom the pro-Palestinian demonstrations are a first.
In Paris, if you sympathize, it is now fashionable to sport a "keffieh", the heavy cotton, patterned scarf Palestinians traditionally wear. Saturday there will be another unauthorized demonstration in Paris, which Le Monde reports Paris is bracing for. Even in Carcassonne, just a thirty-minute car ride from Caunes, signs of the wave of pro-Palestinian sentiment are manifest: dropping off my last guest at the Carcassonne SNCF station Saturday evening, a pair of young men, not more than eighteen, of Arab descent and spotlessly dressed in summer wear that would not be out of place at a Hamptons bash, display large, bold-faced stickers on the fronts of their polo shirts:
"Palestine for the Palestinians"
Social networking has fed the fervor many young French of Arab descent feel. What the intersection of fundamentalist militants, the old French left and modern French-Arab youth will bring to the debate over the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis who fear it has become a launching pad for attacks against Israel is anybody's guess. Among the Jewish community in France there is a sense that France's history of anti-semitism means the country's leaders talk of "respect for different points of view", but refuse to take the necessary steps. The massacre of schoolchildren and a teacher in Toulouse just a few years ago, along with the publicly expressed anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie LePen, coupled with the government's inability to control pro-Palestinian demonstrators set on creating the conditions for riots does not seem like a passing phase in their view. Even François Hollande has been quoted as saying, "There's Ramadan coming up, it's the summer…it's going to be tense."
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