Gillian
Bennett & Paul Smith, Urban Legends
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 141.
The story
below was told to Gillian Bennett in Manchester (UK) in the summer of 1981 by a
neighbor who had heard it in the hairdresser’s. [...]
A woman I
know always makes sandwiches for her husband’s lunch. Anyway, one day she makes
him salmon sandwiches and gives the left-overs to the cat, and goes out
shopping. When she comes back she finds the cat unconscious on the back
doorstep. She panics, rings her husband at work, and tells him to go to
hospital ‘cos the salmon must be contaminated. So off he goes, has his stomach
pumped out, poor man! Later that evening a neighbor calls, says, “Sorry, I was
working on the roof and I dropped a brick on your cat” (Bennett Collection).
Los Angeles Free Press,
vol. 11, no. 17, issue 511, 3 May 1974, p. 3.
“Yvonne
Fouger of Montelmar, France, telephoned the veterinarian when her dog passed
out. The doctor […] diagnose[d] the case as one of food poisoning from the
canned meat he had eaten. Fouger immediately telephoned her husband at work, to
warn him that she had put sandwiches made from the same meat in his lunchbox.”
