The Toad

The other night our three yorkies announced to me that they just had to go outside at 3:30 in the morning. We have two females and a male who fancies himself as the the big alpha male of the neighborhood. He has a game he likes to play, whereby he brings a ball to you and drops it at your feet. He then waits for you to try to pick it up. He rushes in at the last second before you can grab the ball, snatches it up in his mouth and walks away with a look of superiority on his face. I guess it is his way of showing his dominance.

That night when I let them outside he started barking at something on the driveway and wouldn't stop. Fearing he would eventually wake the neighbors, I went outside to retreive him. Just as I got to him, he pounced on the object on the ground as if it were one of his tennis balls that plays the game with. As I picked him up, he started to thrash about violently as if to dislodge something in his mouth. When I got him into the light, I saw that he was foaming at the mouth and was still violently thrashing about as if to get rid of something in his mouth.

Thinking that he had just been stung by bee in the mouth, I took him to my wife so she could help me calm him down. We couldn't find anything wrong with him other than the large amounts of foam that he was generating in his mouth.

I went back outside with a flashlight to see what he had tried to pick up, and discovered a rather large toad. Then I understood. I remembered that toads and some frogs secrete a poison that is very foul tasting so that predators will drop them and not eat them. His foaming at the mouth was his reaction to the poison. He recovered with no ill effects.

I could not help but draw a parellel between this incident and our love affair with sin. We say we can leave it alone, but we wait and watch to see if someone is going to take it away from us. If our consience tries to get close to the source of the problem, we rush in and embrace the sin again. And we pay the price. Sometimes we forget the bitter taste it will leave in our mouths.