Did any of you see Nightline last night? The show included a story on "You Are What You Eat," which reported on dogs who ingest questionable substances.

Like the dog who ate about $100 in $20 bills. Or the one who sucked down a tube of glue, which happened to be a blessing in disguise because it protected his stomach from the cell phone charger he had eaten.

In college I had a Lab/Irish Setter mix who was quite creative in his dinner choices. I recall them including a jar of Vaseline and a good portion of the linoleum on the kitchen floor.

Arthur is such a finicky eater that I don't have to worry about him digesting non-edible items. He barely eats his dog food, and last week he actually spit his Pupperoni -- once a favorite -- back into the drawer, deeply offended that I had not offered him something from the other bag of treats. If I offer him a rawhide bone, he firmly pushes it away with his nose.

And that's a good thing, because it seems that veterinarians charge by the pound. Arthur, who weighs in at 153, can rack up a vet bill like nobody's business, and that's when he's healthy!

I don't want to know what it would cost to operate on his stomach to remove foreign objects. It would probably be somewhere in the area of what I paid for my cat Murphy to stay in the hospital for a week for tests -- which is just about what it cost for me to have surgery on my hip.

The pre-insurance cost of x-rays and my consultation with an orthopedic surgeon was less than a third of what it cost Arthur to get some shots and a check-up the other day. Fortunately people doctors do not charge by the pound, or those costs might have been a bit closer.

But the reality is that whatever the cost to keep or make our pets healthy, we're going to pay it...as long as they don't eat the credit cards.