Beehive-Eating Labrador Wins Insurance Award

Insurance is a business necessity when it comes to protecting your livelihood. And although most of us can envision the typical salon scenarios that may lead to an insurance settlement, I’m sure there have been countless claims filed that approach the absurd.

Since I know many of you are dog lovers like me, I thought I’d share the latest from a company that specializes in pet health insurance. They hold an annual contest to celebrate their most bizarre claims – with the “winner,” as voted on by the public, receiving the coveted Hambone Award. The honor received its name thanks to an insured dog that got stuck in a refrigerator and ate an entire Thanksgiving ham before being found with a licked-clean hambone and a mild case of hypothermia. As such, winners receive a bronze trophy in the shape of a ham, as well as a gift basket full of doggie toys and treats.

Without further ado, this year’s winner is Ellie, a Labrador retriever from Santee, Calif., that ate an entire beehive and its thousands of inhabitants. The crunching canine has managed to eat everything from wooden toy train tracks to laptop computer keys, so the beehive in the backyard was just another culinary adventure for this insatiable pooch. Unfortunately for Ellie, the recently sprayed beehive was full of pesticides and thousands of dead bees, and that combination sent her to the veterinary hospital later that night. Ellie was treated and sent home with an upset stomach but made a full recovery.

In second place was Aubie the Border collie from Birmingham, Ala. Aubie has a particular aggression toward the mail carrier. In order to get to his letter-carrying “foe,” Aubie leaped through a closed living room window, shattering a pane of glass and cutting his left front leg in the process. Fortunately, Aubie’s owner was home at the time and was able to wrap Aubie’s leg in a towel before rushing him to his veterinarian’s office. Two and a half hours and forty stitches later, Aubie was good as new again. “Aubie’s never been enamored with the mailman,” his owner summed up.

And in third place is Belleville, Ill.-based Darci the West Highland white terrier. Darci always lunged at noisy appliances, but had never actually bitten one. That all changed the day Darci took a nip at a buzzing chainsaw. The chainsaw cut two small holes into Darci’s muzzle and required five hours of surgery.

Additional nominees for the 2010 VPI Hambone Award included a boxer that chased and caught a moving delivery van by biting into one of its tires, a standard poodle with a taste for dirty diapers, a Jack Russell terrier that wrestled with a predatory lizard while in Australia, a Labrador retriever that ran tongue first into the pointy-end of a stick during a game of fetch, and a California desert tortoise that scalped himself on a branch and his own shell. Like Ellie, all pets considered for the award made full recoveries and received insurance reimbursements for eligible expenses. Full stories for all 2010 nominees can be found at www.vpihamboneaward.com.

So, are these crazy insurance claim awards just for the dogs, or do you have a salon nomination or two of your own…?