One of my dogs has gone mad.
No, not the kind where she’s got rabies and running havoc through 1890s London.
And it’s not the kind of mad where she made a potion in her doggie laboratory, and has now turned into Ms. God (Get it? Dr. Dog and Ms. God…Okay, never mind.)
It’s certainly not the kind where she’s foaming at the mouth…
Well, actually, she is pretty darned angry. So for all I know, she could be foaming at the mouth. But, again, not from rabies.
Why is my dog Mae (she prefers to use a pseudonym when I write about her) so upset?
Because she can’t have peanut butter anymore.
Yep. That’s it. That’s why.
Due to a recent and quite scary vet visit, she can no longer have fatty foods.
Luckily for us, despite the fact that she’s quite a little dog, she had the eating power of a Great Dane. In fact, if her brother (through adoption) leaves even a few pieces of food when he’s finished, she skulks over, and when she thinks we’re not paying attention, she begins to suck his food down faster than a Hoover before company’s coming.
There have been times when she’s done this so hard that she moves his plate clear into the other room.
That’s my girl.
But when she has to get a pill, we’ve always put it in peanut butter. She loves it. Even when we use it for our own sandwiches, her nose smells it, and she comes running like an ‘80s mom going after that last Cabbage Patch doll. She books it.
If you could see her just when it’s time for her regular food, you’d think she hadn’t been fed in 5 years.
She dances like Snoopy because it’s Suppertime, Suppertime, Suppertime! She spins like Stevie Nicks. She jumps like a kangaroo. Then, she chases me into the kitchen, batting at the back of my legs with her tiny paws the entire time.
She’s absolutely adorable.
Which is why that not being able to give her one of her favorite things in the world has been tough.
When she first got home from the vet, she was tired. So she didn’t miss the peanut butter. And cooked chicken breast with a pill hidden inside seemed just fine with her.
We could tell she was back to herself when she ate the chicken and spit out the pill.
We can’t give her any of the pocket-type pill hider treats on the market because they tend to be high in fat.
We tried to hide it in rice.
Nope. Didn’t work. She ate every grain of rice and left the pill intact. Perhaps a little spitty, but still whole.
We tried putting it in the food the vet gave us.
Nope. How a dog gets a pill out of wet dog food, I’ll never know.
Mae should go work a forensic team—she could find the tiniest bits of clues hidden in the worst crime scenes ever. I could see it now: NCIS: Going to the Dogs
Finally, my husband, at his wit’s end by this time, got a slightly bigger piece of chicken, slit it, put the pill in, and gave it to her.
Success!!!
As time as gone on, Mae went from being happy about getting chicken to first being pitiful about no more peanut butter.
You dog owners know that pitiful look that our fuzzy family members can give. They must learn it when they’re puppies with their moms.
In the past, when she gave us that look, we’d be moved to give her little face anything she desired.
But not anymore.
We made it through the sad looks. Then the denial. Now, she’s moved on to the next stage—anger.
Mae, we hope, will pass through the bargaining stage and move right into acceptance. That would be good for all of us.
I just don’t want to be around when she realizes that she also can’t have cheese.
Michele “Wojo” Wojciechowski, when she’s not trying to ignore her dogs when they make sad, pitiful faces to get what they want, writes Wojo’s World®” from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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