You say 'teat', I say 'peat'...

Recently I was subbing a news story about a major drugs bust, in which 684kg of cocaine was discovered on a truck headed from Spain to England. The raw copy contained the following paragraph:

The drugs were found in plastic bags packed around cash registers and under piles of teat. A regional customs spokesman says: “It’s the biggest haul of cocaine ever seized in mainland France.”

I asked the writer of the story what 'teat' was. She said it was like soil. I asked her if she meant 'peat'. She said, no, 'teat'. She then looked up 'teat' in the dictionary just to check. It turned out she had meant 'peat'.

If 'teat' had made it into press, we would have both looked like tits.