Published: 11:40 AM, 26 May 2017
'My dog ate my passport' player ahead of international tour
Mr Boots, a seven-month-old cocker spaniel from Cornwall, is definitely in the dog house. Why? He chewed up his human's passport. Oops. What makes it worse is that his human is rugby player Matthew Shepherd, who was all set to fly to Spain to represent Britain internationally.
According to the BBC, Mr Shepherd took his passport out to check its validity ahead of the trip. He then left it out on a table. Big mistake.
"When I got back I saw pieces of paper on the floor and didn't know what it was. Then I saw him on the bed with the passport in his mouth," Mr Shepherd told the BBC.
"I was in shock, I didn't know what to do."
"We also have a seven-year-old cocker spaniel called Honey, and she left the passport alone, but Mr Boots fancied chewing something, so he had a little bit of that," he told Cornwall Live.
"You can give him all the toys in the world, but he still wants something else."
Bad dog.
But there's a happy ending to this story. While a new passport can take weeks to get, Mr Shepherd told the BBC "the authorities agreed to speed things up and help out as I was representing my country."
Of course, he did have to make an eight-hour round trip to the nearest passport office.
And as for Mr Boots? Turns out he put his "puppy-dog eyes" to good use.
"It's my fault, I left it on the table," the BBC reported Mr Shepherd saying. "You can't be mad with a puppy, can you?"
