My 12 year old son is responsible for saving the life of his dog after seeing that the "responsible" adults in the family, his dad and I, were not acting responsibly enough to take his beloved pet Lexi to the vet.

We had come home from eating out to discover that Lexi had somehow reached a container of poison mole pellets and chewed off the lid. There were still a lot of poison pellets remaining in the container so my husband and I thought she hadn't eaten any of them at first. When she vomited, my husband did see some undigested pellets, but we thought the problem was solved because there wasn't anything left in her stomach and there wasn't anything we could do anyway because the vet's office was closed for the weekend.

My son looked up information on zinc phosphide poisoning in dogs and made a very convincing argument that we absolutely had to take her to a vet. He pointed out that she had ingested a very slow acting poison so just because she wasn't showing any signs of neurological problems yet, she could still have serious damage being done to her body. He read to us all the things that could be done, like using activated charcoal, that could help reduce the toxicity of the poison. He did not give up. He was going to do whatever he had to do to get her help. He convinced me to call poison control and they said to take her to an animal emergency hospital IMMEDIATELY.

My son didn't volunteer this time to help her when she needed to vomit--twice in the 45 minute drive to the animal hospital, because he had to deal with sitting in dog vomit all the way home when we picked her up from being spayed several months ago and he got sick from the smell. So I did that, but he talked to her and made sure she was being taken care of.

Lexi is still in the animal hospital but she is doing well and we are supposed to pick her up today. The last we heard, the bill was over $700, but my son said it is a price we have to pay for not being precautious. He was willing to do without things on his upcoming vacation with his big sister if he had to, even though it was not his fault.

He asked why we would ever take this kind of risk by having this poison anywhere near our house? He thought my not knowing we had it was a weak defense. He thought it was my responsibility to know because I was the one who let her out in the backyard. Why didn't we look for safer alternatives? This kid has always asked hard questions.

By the way, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but the neuropsychologist said he might have a few executive function issues after we said time management was sometimes a problem and he often couldn't remember to keep his computer/desk area clean. Who really had better executive functioning in this case?