First 90 Days with Your Dog: No Vet Bills, No Chaos

Chapter 1: The 90-Day Dog-Proofing Audit: What to Secure Before the Car Ride Home

The statistic that haunts every emergency vet is this: the most common surgery they perform on dogs under one year old isn’t for a virus, a broken bone, or a congenital defect. It’s for a foreign body obstruction. That’s a polite way of saying your dog swallowed something that is now stuck in their intestines, and it’s killing them slowly. The object in question is often a sock. Sometimes it’s a child’s toy, a hair tie, a corn cob, or the pit of an avocado. The surgery to remove it—cutting open your dog’s abdomen, removing the blockage, and hoping the intestinal tissue hasn’t started to die—will cost you between three thousand and seven thousand dollars, depending on where you live and how complicated the surgery becomes.

That surgery is almost always preventable. Not through training, not through discipline, and not through a miracle product. It’s preventable through a single afternoon of focused, slightly paranoid effort before you bring your dog home. The problem is that almost nobody does this. You’ll bring your puppy or rescue dog into a home you’ve lived in for years, a home you think you know intimately, a home that feels safe. That home, to a dog, is a smorgasbord of hazards that look like fun. A dog doesn’t see a charging cable. It sees a vine to tug. A dog doesn’t see a bottle of ibuprofen on your nightstand. It sees