A Pittsburgh couple's nervous dog decided to have an expensive snack when he ate and destroyed nearly $4,000 in cash last month, leading his owners on a tricky rescue mission.
On December 8, Clayton and Carrie Law couldn't believe that their dog Cecil had eaten the $4,000 cash they had just withdrawn from the bank. Clayton had put the money on the kitchen table and 30 minutes later Cecil decided to eat the money.
“I was shocked,” Clayton said. “It was so out of character for him. He didn't eat food from the coffee table. I was just shocked because it was very unlike him.”
Cecil took about half the money and tore up the other half, Clayton said.
The couple searched online for “What to do if their dog eats money.” The result of the laws was that mutilated money was mailed to the office of the US Bureau of Graving and Printing in Washington, DC.
However, the length of standard claims can range from six months to three years. Instead of waiting, Carrie called the couple at their bank to ask if they could deposit damaged money. They learned this was a common occurrence, and the bank advised lawmakers to wait for Cecil to send the money away – one way or another.
“We were pretty depressed about the situation when it happened,” Clayton said. “At around two in the morning that night, Cecil woke us up because he was vomiting. At that point, I felt hopeful when I saw the $100 bills coming out.”
Walking through feces for several hours a day
Over the next three days, Cecil eliminated $50 and $100 bills. The Laws had a system: Clayton collected the poop, stood at the sink and sorted through the waste. In the meantime, Carrie would try to match the serial numbers on the scraps of invoices and tape them together.
“We put in several hours every day to get our money back,” Carrie said. “We couldn’t get everything back as the cash balance dwindled on the third day.”
The Laws were able to recover around $3,500 of the original $4,000 that Cecil tore up and ate. You still have the money you got back at home and want to check whether the bank will accept it.
“We were initially angry, but now we're just laughing about the whole situation,” Clayton said. “When my wife posted the video on Instagram, we couldn’t believe the response we got.”
The video is going viral
When Carrie posted a video of what happened on Instagram, she initially thought only a few friends would see it and engage with it.
Since its release on December 14, the video has received nearly 12 million views on Instagram.
The viral video also helped Clayton, a marketing and sales trainer specializing in health and fitness, gain a new client who saw the video.
“The reception we got from the video was insane,” Carrie said.