Opossum eats whole Costco chocolate cake, fans have big feelings: ‘Me too girl’
Cathy Free
Kim Doggett couldn’t find room in her refrigerator for a chocolate mousse cake she’d picked up at Costco last weekend.
“We usually have a houseful of people, so I decided to do what I always do in the winter,” she said. “I put it outside on the back deck.”
Doggett, who lives in Gretna, Nebraska, near Omaha, then forgot about the tuxedo cake with chocolate ganache, which one reviewer described as a religious experience.
On Sunday night, she asked her son, Hayden Doggett, to pop outside with a batch of homemade peanut butter balls because there wasn’t room in the fridge for them, either.
Hayden flipped on the porch light, opened the back door, then quickly slammed it shut.
“He said, ‘I’m not doing this - there’s an opossum out there,’” recalled Doggett, 55.
She thought he was joking, but it turned out the opossum was very real. It also loved chocolate cake.
“The plastic cover on the cake was gone, and so was almost all of the cake,” Doggett said. “There were chocolate paw prints all over my white sectional furniture.”
She and Hayden later learned that the small Virginia opossum was female. They tried to scare her away, but she refused to budge from her curled-up position in the middle of one of the cushions.
“She didn’t look so great - she was kind of panting,” Doggett said. “I couldn’t believe the whole cake was gone. I started thinking, ‘Is chocolate poisonous for opossums?”
She did some quick research and learned that wild opossums will eat almost anything, including roadkill, garbage, fruit and insects. Chocolate, caffeine and alcohol could be toxic.
“I knew there was no way I could just leave a sick opossum there overnight,” Doggett said. “Obviously, it had too much of a good thing.”
She called the local Humane Society, and an animal control officer showed up about 40 minutes later to retrieve the opossum, she said.
“He snagged her by the neck and handled her like a cat to get her into the carrier,” Doggett said. “She just looked at him and didn’t put up much of a fight.”
The officer took the marsupial to the Humane Society for a checkup, where it was noted she was alert and appeared to be in good health despite overindulging on a chocolate cake that was arguably larger than she was.
To be safe, though, the veterinarian decided the 5½-pound opossum would benefit from some time in rehab.
A Humane Society worker took the critter the next day to Nebraska Wildlife Rehab with a note attached to her carrier: “Opossum was brought in due to having eaten an entire Costco chocolate cake.”
“The note immediately got our attention,” said the center’s executive director, Laura Stastny, in an emailed statement. “We assume that chocolate would be toxic to opossums and other wildlife, but we don’t know of any studies confirming that.”
Stastny said the opossum was given fluids and a full exam, including bloodwork and X-rays. The animal’s blood showed a high level of lead toxicity, not from chocolate, but from eating plants, insects and fungi contaminated by lead soil.
The opossum is now receiving intravenous chelation therapy at the Baldwin Wildlife Center and Hubbard Family Wildlife Hospital to remove the lead, and she’ll be ready to return to the wild sometime in March, Stastny said.
“Perhaps she was lucky she stole that cake because she was caught and is now getting the critical treatment she needs,” she said.
Stastny and other wildlife rehab staffers decided to have a little fun with the opossum’s overindulgence.
“Sometimes a sweet tooth just can’t wait until Valentine’s Day!” they posted on Facebook with a cute photo of the opossum and a summary of her chocolate binge.
More than 11,000 people liked the post, and another 1,200 comments poured in with people saying they could relate:
“Me too girl”
“My girl is out here living the dream.”
“I feel this opossum in my soul.”
“We listen and we don’t judge.”
“She is such a queen for that.”
“Well, technically if she ate the whole cake at once, she only had one piece.”
Doggett said she’s glad people are finding something to laugh about this Valentine’s Day. She works as a real estate agent and said she’ll never hear the end of it at the office.
“I showed a house last spring and there were raccoons inside when we got there,” she said. “It was a fixer-upper, and they’d gotten in through a hole in the roof. So people were like, ‘You have raccoons here, opossums there. What’s next?’”
Doggett said she’s certain of one thing.
“I’m planning to pick up another Costco chocolate cake real soon,” she said. “I won’t be leaving this one on the deck.”