Elsa is hyperphagic. We learned this almost immediately. Her appetite has no off switch. From the beginning, she ate anything and everything she could reach, if it was vaguely related to food, and given the opportunity, she still does. She inhales her food, and we have tried every method in the book to slow her down. We tried the puzzle bowl, a small plastic bowl with three large marshmallow sized lumps in the middle that she had to work around to eat. She mastered that in a few months, and it became much less effective after that. Mr S-P tried sprinkling just a few pieces of kibble at a time, but that is time consuming and not very enjoyable first thing in the morning when we would rather be having coffee and breakfast ourselves. When we were up in the mountains, at our good friend's father's birthday party, one of the family members gave us a brilliant idea. I call it the "gravy train method." We feed her last, and before she gets her dog food, we pour six or eight ounces of water in her bowl, and then add the dry food. She can't just Hoover it into her belly that way. She actually has to work it a little bit with her mouth, although I'm not sure I can officially call it "chewing." But this has been the best thing to come along in the eight years we've had her.
Unfortunately, the new housing setup has dramatically cut back on her traditional caloric intake. The dogs spend most of their time outside, and until bitterly cold weather and the purchase of a different style of Murray incontinence system, they sleep in the garage. The dogs have much less access to people food, because I've only taken a dish out for them to lick once in the last three weeks (with disastrous results seven hours later, so I won't be doing that again). Plus, they have no access to the recycled cat food that maintained them for years. (Yeah, you know what I mean.) So Elsa is making up the loss of the calories. When we lived in New Mexico, every apple that fell from a giant tree was fair game for her. Here, she thinks she has carte blanche to eat all of my tomatoes and strawberries. I bet she is the reason I keep finding broken raspberry canes. I picked a handful of tomatoes today, every one that was even sort of ripened, and I brought them in to sit next to ripe tomatoes and avocado, in the hopes that they'll be edible for me, not for that foraging dog. I cannot wait until we move the old chain link fence to block her off from the garden. I'm so mad at her.
It helped work out some of my annoyance to go out and prune the sunflowers like I've been threatening to do for weeks. Of course, once I got at it, I realized just how many tomatoes are missing now (hundreds!!), and it just spun me back up again. The hornets buzzed past my head often as I clipped, and the flowers danced through the air when I removed the heavy spent sunflower heads with each snip of the pruners. I'm not sure what snagged the side of my hand, a thorn, a sunflower, or a hornet, but something stung me good. (If it was a hornet, it was only a glancing blow.) But now, more of the sunshine can reach the lower layers of garden. There are only a few weeks left to work it, but I'm going to get every bit of good out of it I can now.
No comments:
Post a Comment