Dodi Checks In

Hey, there.  Know who I am?  I will give you a hint.  I have a beautiful body of red hair and I weigh eleven pounds.  Recently, I have had it real good.  I haven’t had time for complaining about much, between sunbathing and brother-bopping.  (Know how annoying little brothers can be?).  

Oh, and there is Benny.  He keeps me going.  Benny is this handsome older gentleman terri-poo.  Good build.  Nice hair.  He is missing a few teeth, but that gives him character.  Benny lives with Crazy-Auntie Leslie.  Me and Baruch go over to his house every day.  So this routine has gotten the way of my literary career.

We always try to get over to his house as early as possible.   Like before Auntie Leslie puts his breakfast onto the counter where we cannot reach it.  Ya’ know.  Love the old-fashioned, chemically loaded dry kibble that sits in a pottery bowl. It tastes fine!  Besides, it smells of Auntie Leslie!

And at the same time, we’ve gotten daily breakfast, Baruch and me, have been working on Ann to improve the level of food she pours into out tin bowl.  Dry gourmet, organic, gluten-free, sugar-free, rock-hard pellets. She seems so tough, but just a slight wriggle of the tip of my tail, and she comes around as fast as a flutter of birdwings when doves fly away.  We agreed.  “Hunger strike!”  We found plenty of food at Auntie’s, and in the meantime, I do have to watch my figure, being a Doxy and all.  Who really wants to eat those gourmet, organic, gluten free, sugar-free pellets she rattles out into our pan each evening, assuming she remembers to even feed us (One of the challenges of raising a distracted, overly-creative owner.)

So over a few months we’ve gotten her trained.  You know, sensitized her to our gustatory needs—we only ate when mix of foods in our bowl moved closer to our desired balance of canned beef stew, or its equivalent, with pellets and water; reinforce her approximations with our yips and our yaps and our little bouncy dances as she approaches the goal. (A sidebar—Aren’t I fortunate? Ann explains behavior modification strategies she learned while teaching.  And I get to experiment on humans.)  

And may I explain something more about my disgust with the pellety stuff Ann tries to feed us.  It doesn’t taste good.  And if I am going to eat enough food to avoid an appearance of an eating disorder, those morsels of sustenance I ought to taste fabulous, like creme-bruleed steak tartare, not sawdust!

Back to my report.  Finally, last week we dogs won. We watched Ann walk out and buy us five cans of dog food.  We have been eating like royalty ever since.  At least until tonight.

So tonight she had this shindig planned for about 30 of her friends.  Worked so hard to get everything spiffy, she had no time to to undergo the task of measuring out the correct amount of stew and pellets.  She grabbed for some rotting raw burgers and crumbled it into our bowl, added pellets and sloshed in a small cup of tap-water (gag).

She laid down our bowl.  Me and Baruch attacked it from different sides.  We wolfed down the burger part.  But those watery pellets?  Spit out every single one of them.  Both of us did.  What a mess!  And Ann never had a chance to clean it up.  I hope every guest noticed what a terrible housecleaner she really is.

P.S.  There is a little bit more to my story.  You know Benny, my toothless, older gentleman?  Well, when I go and eat his food I spit out some of that out, too.  Benny loves my partially-chewed breakfast.  Why if Ann had simply brought Benny over to her party this evening, we’d have cleaned it all up!  We just wanted a friend of our own!

Your Sweet-Precious-Doxy-Friend
Dodi