Tuesday 8 September 2015

YOU CAN LEAD A DOG TO.....



Yes, you can lead a dog to the food bowl, but you can’t make it eat. Annie has passed her sixteenth year, her hearing is almost gone, she has heart failure and now she has decided not to eat.  At least, she off all food made for dogs. In the past fortnight, I have fed her chicken, kangaroo, vegetables-sometimes she eats her veggies. But the rest of it has ended up in the garbage bin. I even shared my rolled oats with her one morning, she ate them, so I thought I was on a winner, but the next day she ignored every bit of food I offered her. I decided I would only feed her when she came to the kitchen and asked for food by wags and body language.  But she didn’t ask. How long can I not feed a dog? Cheese is okay. She’ll eat that.
  She has also decided not to swallow her heart tablets which she formerly ate like they were chocolate.
Apart from that she is a fit dog. She races from the garden to the front door, leaps over the mat and then shakes the garden mulch off her coat onto the floor. No problem leaping onto the sofa either.
Today I bought a roast chicken. Not for me, I wouldn’t eat it if you paid me. For Annie. She smelt it coming in the door and you would have thought it was Christmas. Great, I thought. I chopped some of the meat and I hid the tablet in the pile.  She danced out to her food dish.
I wanted to make sure she ate the tablet so I stood and watched. She sat and watched me with an expression the clearly said, “Wot, no privacy?”
I came back later and found the chicken had been eaten, but the tablet licked clean was on the floor beside her food dish.
 Now I have crushed the tablet and wrapped it in the chicken skin. I had to put that in another helping of chopped meat.

Great… she has eaten and has had her tablet. That’s today, tomorrow she might be fasting again. Or do you think she is just on strike, demanding people's food? Caring for a geriatric dog is no easy job.

1 comment:

  1. Our Millie cat was sick when we got home from holidays with not one but two abscesses and very much off her food. I ended up hand feeding her prawns, blue vein cheese, chicken and other delicacies she never usually gets. Bethany even suggested she was faking it for the food. Now she is all well and eating the usual boring
    stuff. But I do relate to your anguish.

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