was my dog poisoned or natural death?

I came home to find my perfectly healthy, happy, energetic, normal weight 5 month old black lab dead 2 days ago. He was fine when he was put into his dog run @ 7:30a, no vomiting, no diarrhea, no symptoms, nothing unusual in the yard. He had a bad habit of eating sticks, wood (he always chewed on our deck), but he had no symptoms of being ill AT ALL. I came home 5:45p, & according to the vet he'd been gone since @ 3 or 4p. His necropsy showed twigs, rocks & plastic (what you put under rock landscaping). His digestive tract up to his belly was normal. From there to his colon it was red, inflamed, lesions, then from colon on it was normal. Normal feces in his colon. He hadn't been drinking excessive water & had absolutely NO SIGNS of being ill. What do you think?

[have 2 kids]

I'm sorry for the loss of your pet.  It sounds like he died from an obstruction (twigs, rocks, plastic)  If his bowel was perforated death happens quickly.    
When our dog had an obstruction she became very ill within hours.   It does not sound like your pet was poisoned.   I think it was just an accident.    

[Ally93]

When the necropsy was done, though, there was no obstruction. I'm wondering if maybe he didn't have a heart problem that had been undetected? I'm just curious if there's something that could have poisoned him that quickly? Everything I've heard of as far as poisoning goes would have caused him to have showed symptoms. It's really upsetting to not know. We could have had all his organs sent for toxicology but sounded like that was going to give us a "maybe it was this, could've been that" answer- so we chose not to do that.

[Ally93]

also, the vet had said possibly strycnine (sp?) would've given him the inflammation but she said he wouldn't have gone that quickly & there was no signs of intrusion in our yard, or any kind of poison on the ground, antifreeze, nothing like that but it's just so odd.

[suzi-q]

i am so very  very sorry....

[Jaybay]

I am so sorry for you and your poor pup.  :-(  The inflammation and lesions in the colon means those tissues were infected, dying or already dead.  That infection may have just reached "critical mass" with the infection getting into his bloodstream - basically, that's what you and I would call blood poisoning.  It can happen so quickly it's stunning.  When the infected tissue is internal, it's not always possible to figure out what is happening until it's too late.  In cases like this, a dog's natural stoicism works against him.  A human would have been screaming in pain long before the infection reached this point.

To illustrate how quickly sepsis can occur, years ago my husband had a tiny blister on his finger from a fish hook.  It didn't even bleed at the time it happened on Sunday morning.  Monday morning I went off to work and hubby was fine.  I came home at lunch and he was laid out on the couch delirious with a 105 fever and red streaks running up his arm.  I shudder to think what would have happened had I not come home that afternoon.

Bless you for asking your vet to do the post mortem.  So many times people come here desperate to find out why their pet died, and there is simply no way of knowing without the PM.  It's terrible enough to lose a dog to a known disease process, but something sudden and unexplained is like falling into a black hole.  You did nothing wrong, and I hope that when the pain of this loss passes you will once again be able to provide a great home to another deserving dog.