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| Molly in the Homewood Parkette |
While we were good at keeping the second vow, we had a bit of trouble getting others to honour it. One of the reasons we eventually stopped taking Molly to crowded dog parks was that we could not prevent other dog owners from giving her dog treats, even when I explained that we didn't want her to have any.
I had good reason to do this, and not just to control the dog's caloric intake. One time, when she was still just a puppy, I had her in the sports field at Jarvis Collegiate with maybe eight other dogs and their owners. A couple of the owners asked if they could give her a treat, and I said "sure" because I didn't know any better at the time. Minutes after the treats went down, they came back up again. I surmised that the combination of unknown food and the excitement of being out of doors made the dog barf. So I explained to everyone who asked after that, that "no" they could not give my dog a treat because it would make her barf. But, lots of people didn't bother to ask.
I'm not quite sure why people like to overfeed dogs, but they do. My family overfed the dachshunds we had when I was growing up. One habitue of a small parkette on Homewood Avenue - who had a severely overweight black Scots terrier - called me an "ogre" because I wouldn't let him give Molly a treat.
His dog died when it was eight years old.
It wasn't just because Molly's barfing provided a handy pretext to keep people from giving her treats; we long thought Molly had a very sensitive stomach. For example, until we learned to not feed her before trips, she always barfed when we travelled by car, something about the effects of de-acceleration on her little body (barfing occurred when we turned off the highway and had to reduce our speed). For maybe the first two years that we had her, we were woken almost every morning to the sound of the dog working her way up the vomit curve. Bruce or I would grab her and run for the bathroom so she could vomit on tile, or in the sink, and not in our bed or on the carpet.
It finally dawned on us, after months and months and months of this, that it might be the dog's food that was the root cause. When we got her from the breeder, we fed her Eukanuba puppy formula, and, because she seemed to like that OK, after she was six months old, we switched her to Eukanuba adult formula, which she also liked well enough. But Eukanuba is high in fat. We switched her to a low-fat dog food - actually designed for dogs on a diet - and she never barfed in the morning again. Which is not to say she never barfed again.
There was the short experiment in feeding her home-made food in an attempt to help her repel her infestation of demodex mange. The naturopath vet had given me a recipe for what she called "healthy power", which was a mix of brewer's yeast and wheat germ and a bunch of other stuff I can no longer recall. I kept it in the fridge and added a teaspoon to the dog's food every meal. I was putting the container of healthy powder away one day when I accidentally spilled a small quantity - more than a teaspoon less than a tablespoon - on the floor. The dog was on it instantly and very helpfully cleaned it right up. I was unconcerned. It was healthy powder after all.
Molly barfed for the next half-day.
Before you get the impression that we never did anything other than imperil Molly's life, I'd like to add that, most of the time, we took good care of her, as you can read here.
Karen
