Arnie the Beagle likes to eat money, however you got it — stacked, fanned, crumbled, crisp, folded, faded, ill-gotten, hard-earned. He eats Hamiltons and Franklins, Jacksons and Washingtons. He eats it off coffee tables and out of envelopes. Why does Arnie eat money? Who knows? He’s a Beagle. One day he decided he wanted to eat money, and the rest is history — about $450 is history, all told.
Naturally, it’s trying to be Arnie’s owner, but Corey and Hope O’Kelley are doing their best. According to Peter Jamison of the Tampa Bay Times, the dog first showed off his talent for ingesting raw currency seven years ago, when the dog lapped up $150 off a coffee table.
“The money was a gift from Hope’s father, and the couple managed to recover $100 intact after it had passed through Arnie’s digestive tract,” writes Jamison.
Things went quiet after that, and the couple supposed Arnie’s quirk was done. But Arnie was just biding his time for the big score, which showed up a few weeks ago in the form of $300 inside an envelope.
Which was inside a wallet. Which was inside a purse. Which was on a kitchen table.
No matter, Arnie took a deep, canine breath and smelled it. Jacksons. Lincolns. Arnie hatched his plan. When everybody went to sleep, Arnie would eat the money.
Everybody went to sleep. Arnie ate the money.
It must have been quite a night. When all was said and done, just $25 remained, strewn on the floor, forlorn. The rest was safely stored in Arnie’s belly.
“The purse was open. The wallet was open,” Corey told the Tampa Bay Times. “I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t as funny as I thought it was.”
Corey, however, wasn’t going to let that $300 go without a fight. In this case, “a fight” meant following Arnie around for a week and carefully parsing his poop for usable bills.
There weren’t any. Arnie had shredded the bills before swallowing them, no doubt to foil his owner.
Corey and Hope, however, are made of sterner stuff. They’re “trying to wash the tattered cash and piece it back together,” writes Jamison.
Hooray?
“We’re kind of used to Arnie being a little bit strange and doing kind of quirky stuff,” Corey said. “We scolded him, but you know, [dogs] don’t really know.”
Oh, Arnie knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s eating money.
