The vet called after the surgery with a question: “Where could your dog have gotten pieces of plastic, pieces of metal, twine, all kinds of stuff in his stomach?” Amanda, who posts on TikTok as @smalltownalabamagirl, did not have an answer. She said what he took out of the dog “filled up a sandwich bag.”
She and her husband brought the dog home with what she called a “nearly a thousand dollar vet bill” and searched the backyard for the source. They came up empty until they started digging through the mulch they had put down. “We started finding all kinds of pieces of plastic, metal, just in the mulch,” she said.
She told the story in a video posted in April 2025, a year after it happened, sitting on her front porch in a pink T shirt under the text “PSA ABOUT MULCH. LISTEN UP ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE DOGS!” It had been in the 80s that week, and she was deep into yard work: 93 bags of mulch already out, 30 more in a truck and another seven waiting.
A caption on screen reads “I HAVE TWO 11 YEAR OLD LAB MIX DOGS.” One morning the previous year, she said, she went out to feed them before work and one of them “was just laying around, wasn’t really that responsive.” She told her husband to take him to the vet. “That’s not like him to not come greet you when you come outside,” she said.
The first phone call was about a large mass in the dog’s stomach. Another line of text fills in what the couple feared: “WE THOUGHT AT FIRST HE WAS GOING TO TELL US CANCER, BUT LUCKILY IT WAS NOT!” According to her, the vet’s early ideas were a small animal the dog had eaten or a mouse that had eaten rat poison. Blood work and X rays did not settle it. She said the vet told her “the only way to find out for sure” was exploratory surgery.
The vet sent her a photo of what came out. She does not show it. “I’ll spare you the grossness of it,” she said.
What she shows instead are pieces she pulled from the mulch, held up to the camera one at a time. A piece of hard plastic. A piece she first calls metal, then says might be more hard plastic. Several small plastic fragments. A piece she took for aluminum that “might have been off a Coke can or something.” Then one more piece of plastic. “That’s not all that we found,” she said, “but that’s just a few small pieces.”
The link between the mulch and the surgery is her own conclusion, drawn from finding the same kinds of material in both places. She said the family switched brands afterward. The name of the earlier brand is not clear in the video. For the 2025 season she bought “whatever the Lowe’s brand was,” which she said comes from a local supplier in her town.
Her fix for 2025: “I made sure to check it as I was spreading it.” For anyone with a dog and a stack of bagged mulch, that means not pouring a bag straight onto the bed. Empty it onto a tarp or into a wheelbarrow first, pull it apart with a gloved hand or a rake, and take out anything that is not wood. Her list of what to look for: hard plastic, small plastic fragments, metal, aluminum and twine.
Mulch that is already down needs the same pass. Her pieces came out of mulch that had already been spread, and she only found them by “messing around in the mulch” after the surgery. Rake through any bed a dog can reach, starting where the dog lies or digs.
Keep what you pull out. A zip bag of debris, kept with the empty mulch bag and the receipt, is what you would take back to the store. It is also what you would hand a vet, whose first guesses in her case were a small animal and rat poison.
The sign she acted on was small: a dog that always came to greet her stayed lying down. She sent him to the vet on that alone. If a dog with access to fresh mulch goes quiet like that, tell the vet about the mulch at the start of the visit.
Her own instruction to viewers was one sentence: “Make sure you don’t have parts and pieces in there that could potentially cost you your dog’s life or a very, very expensive vet bill.”
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