One Florida family unwittingly helped serve a very expensive meal to their dog — $1,000 in cash — and then forced the pet to cough it up.
"I just think this is hilarious," the dog's owner, Christy Lawrenson of St. Augustine, Fla., told WJXT in Jacksonville, Fla on Friday.
She laughs now, but it was a different story two weeks ago.
"My husband and I are trying to pay off my car, and so every time we save $1,000, we just take it to the bank and we just put it in the account," she told the Jacksonville station.
This time, she took the cash, paper-clipped it and left it in an envelope on the counter, she said. The couple then said goodbye to their dog Tuity, a Labrador Retriever/chow/bulldog mix, and left for work.
When her husband came home for lunch, the envelope was gone and he saw shards of $100 bills strewn across the floor.
The rest, including the paperclip, was in Tuity's stomach, she said.
Lawrenson told WJXT that her husband induced the dog to vomit by feeding Tuity hydrogen peroxide.
"I took the money from the vomit and put it in a bag and saved it for him because I didn't want to puzzle it back together. It was still not real to me even though I had dug through vomit all afternoon," Lawrenson said.
They pieced $900 back together, but the last $100 bill had one too many serial numbers missing, she said.
The couple sent it to the Department of Treasury with a letter of explanation.
"I didn't really see that one coming, and I guarantee we'll keep money away from him for now on," Lawrenson said