Labrador Retrievers – the Tiger Sharks of the Land?

I’m a Shark Week addict. This last week I overloaded my DVR by recording every episode in HD, even though I had seen most of the shows at least once before. And one thing any regular Shark Week watcher knows is that over the course of the week you will hear multiple times about how tiger sharks are the garbage collectors of the sea. Why? Because tiger sharks have been caught with all of the following in their stomachs:

• License plates
• Pieces of old tires
• Suits of armor
• Boat cushions
• Shoes
• Barbie dolls
• Glass bottles

This got me thinking because since starting here at VPI I’ve heard many comments about how Labradors will eat anything. When we get an unusual “ingestion” claim, you’ll hear “I bet it was a Lab”. Keeping in mind that we insure about 40,000 Labradors—more than any other breed of dog by a wide margin—I wondered if this was just a case of having so many Labradors insured that they were just getting a bad rap. So I did a little digging into our claims database to find out if they deserve their indiscriminate eating reputation.

As our Hambone Award® nominees have shown, Labradors do eat some interesting things, such as beehives, 23 packs of instant breakfast, or the same sock twice. So far in 2010 VPI has had more than 500 Labrador claims that were caused by ingesting a foreign object. The next closest breed with foreign body ingestion claims is golden retrievers with more than 200 followed by boxers with more than 80 claims. While this may appear to prove that Labradors have earned their reputation for eating everything, I looked a little further.

The total number of claims we’ve received so far in 2010 for Labradors is about 65,000. This means foreign body ingestions account for almost 0.8% of all Labrador claims. For golden retrievers foreign ingestions drop to about 0.7% and boxers and bulldogs are both around 0.6%. From there the numbers drop more all the way down to the toy poodle with ingestion claims around 0.1%.

It appears the Labrador’s reputation for eating almost anything is definitely earned. Does this mean Labradors are the “tiger sharks” of the land? I’d probably hold off on saying that until we can compare some of the things bears eat, but it might be safe to say that Labradors are the garbage collectors of the canine kingdom.