Here’s an Animal Story That’s a Bit Hard to Swallow

--A Labrador retriever walked around for more than a month with a 10-inch, 14-ounce socket wrench in its belly, a veterinarian in Middleboro, Mass., said. “This is probably the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” David H.R. Johnson said. An uncharacteristic loss of appetite was the first sign something was wrong with Lattie, a 56-pound, 8-year-old purebred, Johnson said. “That’s unusual because she’s such a good old chow hound,” he said. “She came in and was her happy, jovial self. But I was feeling her belly, and I said, ‘What in the heck is this?’ I decided we had better take an X-ray. When I did, I almost fell over.” Lattie’s owner, Sandra Kesse of Wareham, said she had no idea how the wrench got inside her pet. “We don’t even have tools around the house,” she said. Johnson said he could not determine if the wrench was ingested or whether it was forcibly put into the dog. “She’d have to take it down like a sword swallower would,” Johnson said. The veterinarian removed the wrench during more than three hours of surgery. He said he believes the wrench had been inside the dog for at least a month because a hole it poked in Lattie’s stomach had healed.

--Anne McNelis might have felt she had egg on her face when yolk oozed from her entry after it fell 115 feet in an egg-dropping competition in Cleveland. But her two remaining competitors suffered the same shattering fate, and the Case Western Reserve University electrical engineering student walked off with the city championship trophy and the $200 first prize because her 9-gram entry was the lightest. Competitors design lightweight containers to protect Grade A large chicken eggs, which are dropped from increasingly greater heights until only one is intact. McNelis’ winning design was one of the simplest of eight entries: a softball-size, plastic foam ball with an egg-shaped cavity in the center. The two halves were held together with rubber bands.

--Almost 50 years after Orson Welles turned over Grover’s Mill Pond in New Jersey to the Martians in his “War of the Worlds” broadcast, the property has been reclaimed by earthlings for use as a park. Lawrence Dey and his daughter, Linda Dey McDonald, donated the property to the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, which plans to turn it over to West Winsdor Township. “To the best of my knowledge, nobody really knows how Grover’s Mill got inserted into the radio broadcast,” says Douglas Forrester, who headed the five-year project to acquire the land. “But that was the place that caused all the stir. The Grover’s Mill water tower still has bullet holes in it.” About $100,000 in state funds has been set aside to improve the property.