Jeff Vogelgesang should have warned his pooch: Don’t bite the $4,100 Internal Revenue Service refund check that feeds you.

Last week, Vogelgesang’s 4-month-old Doberman pinscher, Nevaeh, got into the mail and devoured the IRS check, panicking the Massillon resident.

“I’ve got a $4,000 dog right now,” Vogelgesang, a driver for Green Line Trucking, joked days after the puppy ate his refund check.

The dog, which he purchased for $400 at Christmas, has chewed belts, a computer cord and a dental retainer. Nevaeh, or “heaven” spelled backward, has been anything but for the 39-year-old, his longtime girlfriend and her son.

“She’s a devil,” Vogelgesang said from the road on Tuesday. “She’s the opposite of heaven all of the sudden.”

For weeks, Vogelgesang warned his girlfriend, Lisa Wood, and her son, Justin, that a check might be in the mail. Put it up, he insisted.

“I knew it was coming,” he said. “I told them two weeks ago to make sure they put the mail up because she’s starting to get into things.”

So when Justin arrived home from work Friday with the mail in hand, he plopped it in the center of the kitchen table.

“I put it on the kitchen table, right in the middle,” he said. “She’s little so I don’t see how she could’ve gotten up and grabbed it.”

Vogelgesang, making deliveries in Cincinnati at the time, called home later that evening to see if the check had arrived.

“My check come yet?” he asked Justin.

“The mail came, but the dog got into something,” Justin replied, not knowing yet what that “something” was.

When Justin read “Department of Treasury,” Vogelgesang reacted like anyone whose dog ate a $4,100 check.

“Oh my God,” he said. “No.”

After an Internal Revenue Service representative stopped laughing at Vogelgesang’s story, he directed him to the department that could handle his claim. He expects to receive a new check in six to eight weeks.

“I was half tempted to run around with a pooper scooper through the yard to try to retrieve the dollar amount, but I thought I’d just wait the six to eight weeks,” he said. “Sure enough, she had to eat my check. She couldn’t eat the gas bill, the electric bill or anything else.”

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But Vogelgesang said he’s learned his lesson.

“The word of the week is ‘direct deposit’ for next year,” he said.

The Independent