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R.I.P. Anna H. Banana

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This morning I finally had to give up the fight and take Anna on her final chariot ride to the vet. She was in so much pain, it just wasn’t right to continue trying to keep her going.

Even when I’d made up my mind and SDXB helped me get her there, I still wasn’t sure…maybe if the pressure sores were what hurt so much, maybe there was something else to try. The vet, Dr. Brooke Hoppe, examined the sore spots carefully. When she manipulated them, the dog evinced no discomfort at all—didn’t blink an eye.

Dr. Hoppe said the large sore on her right hip was not a pressure sore and that there really was no sign of infection in it. She concluded that it was a patch of somewhat inflamed skin, and that handling it did not cause any pain. That was why Anna could lay on the hard floor on top of it—because that was not what hurt. Ditto the elbow pain: her elbow patches were just the usual calluses. One had been a bit abraded, but it was not a pressure sore.

The pain was not on the skin: it was bone-deep. Her spine was effectively calcified into an inflexible rod, and her hips were becoming deformed from the arthritis and probably, too, late-stage dysplasia. She could no longer sit at all, and to lay down she had to cantilever herself halfway there and then slide to the floor with a thud. The hair on her hocks was dirty and worn where she’d had to slide to a down position. Dr. Hoppe said there were a couple of other painkillers we could try, since the Tramadol was doing little or nothing for her. But it was unlikely they would help much, and if they did, the effort would be strictly palliative: there was nothing we could do for the condition of her bones.

So, it was time.

It’s going to be pretty lonely around this place. While I was vacuuming out the double-sided dog door preparatory to sealing it into its burglar-proof mode, I looked up and expected to see Anna standing in the door to the room, where she would be watching me whenever I indulged any such behavior. And throwing away poor old worn-out Toy was pretty hard.

But on the other hand… Now I can go out of town for a weekend. I haven’t even made a day trip in longer than I can remember, or visited my friends on the far west side, because I’ve had to be back here by six o’clock to feed and medicate the dog. I have exactly no one who can be imposed upon to come over here and feed the dog twice a day and medicate her upwards of six times a day. By the time the end finally dragged around, I was giving her 16 pills a day, smearing two different ointments on her twice a day, and administering four eyedrops every day. No one is gunna do that so I can take off for Flagstaff or Santa Fe. Now I don’t have to scour dog poop out of the porous CoolDecking around the pool-almost every day!-and now I can take down the jury-rigged fence that kept her from falling in the drink. Now I can trade in the gas-guzzling Dog Chariot for a more fuel-efficient car. Now when I clean the house, it will stay clean for a few days. And now that I don’t need a big fenced yard, I can sell my house and move someplace smaller and easier to care for.

It’s amazing to think that dog has been with me through several major phases of my life. When I brought her home as a puppy, I was solidly middle-aged. Now I’m old. That was part of the dilemma about putting her to sleep. Hey! My bones ache, too—my back aches when I get up, and my shoulders hurt and my neck hurts, but I’m not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil because of it. Why should anyone think she would be? But I have to allow, I can get up, which she could barely manage.

Now what? On the one hand, I think no more dogs!!!!! On the other, it’s hard to imagine being without a doggy companion. I’ve had dogs—big ones, shepherds and retrievers and a dobe and a greyhound—all my adult life. If I get another dog, it can’t be another 85-pounder. It will have to be small enough that I can pick it up to get it into the car if it’s sick or hurt, small enough that I can pick it up to take it out of harm’s way (oh! the aggressive off-the-leash curs Anna and I engaged!). Since I don’t much care for little yappers, I can’t imagine what kind of dog that would be.

So for the nonce I’m done imagining.

I probably won’t post tomorrow. The rest of this weekend will be spent in a cleaning frenzy.

Later!

Month of extreme frugality (NOT!)

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Wow! If there’s any question about whether Karma is mad at me, the laughable effort at a month of extreme frugality answers it! Not only did I fail to save extra money to apply toward the Renovation Loan Payoff Fund, for the first time since I started the weekly budgeting system, I ended the month-long cycle in the red!

I was $23.57 in the black on May 16 and thought I might make it to the end of the billing cycle, but just couldn’t do it. The main reasons were the dog and the astronomical cost of gas.

The dog went off her feed, causing her to barf up the meds. So I had to go by Sprouts to pick up some ground lamb and lamb neck bones to persuade her to eat; while I was there I got some hamburger for myself (totaling $15.89). Then I had to buy a new prescription antibiotic for her, relatively cheap at $26.80 but still more than I had left in the budget, even without the cost of food. These two trips consumed just enough gas that I wasn’t sure I could make the 36-mile round trip to the office on what remained in the gas tank, plus I had to come home the long way to go by a client’s office and deliver a completed project. My van gets 18 miles to the gallon, so I bought about 2 1/3 gallons at Costco: 13 cents a gallon under the going rate, but still $3.47 a gallon. These expenses put me in the red.

This compares abysmally with the first three months of this year:

Before this disastrous month, the worst I did when I wasn’t trying to save had me $151 in the black!

What did the job on my budget was the cost of veterinary care: $379.75 to my old vet and $278.08 to the new vet, plus assorted extra meds. Plus special food. The cost of gas didn’t help-really, if gas were not exorbitant, I might have ended in the black despite the dog headaches.

Luckily, I kept $500 of the previous months’ savings in the money market checking account used to pay these costs as an emergency “cushion.” So when the American Express bill arrives, there will be enough to pay it. But it frosts my cookies.

At this point, it looks like the only hope of getting the vet bills under control is to put the dog down. The vaginal infection is better, but the nose thing just keeps getting worse. She can barely breathe through her nose. Just the cost of diagnosing what ails her starts at $300, to X-ray her skull. If she has a tumor, then she should be put to sleep right away, because it’s terminal and there’s nothing effective that can be done: $300 + $379.75 + $278.08 = $957.83 that I might as well have run through the shredder. If she doesn’t have a tumor but probably has something stuck in her nose, they have to thread a lighted tool into her nasal cavity, which in a dog is an extremely complex maze, to try to fish it out. The vet said this would be “expensive.” When a veterinarian calls something “expensive,” you can be sure the term an ordinary mortal would use is “ruinous.”

So, it may be better just to put her to sleep now. She’s had a long run: she’s almost 13 years old, two years past the normal life span of a German shepherd. I hate to contemplate it: a stuffy nose shouldn’t be a capital offense. On the other hand, heavy panting and rapid breathing are signs of doggy pain, and with the vaginal infection pretty much healed, we know the pain isn’t coming from that. The fact that her nose doesn’t appear to be congested while she’s sleeping (i.e., unconscious) suggests the noisy breathing isn’t caused by a nasal blockage but indicates discomfort or pain. She keeps me awake half the night every night, and I have to get up and get out of the house by 7:30. I’m running on fumes myself at this point-this has gone on for a couple of months-and I’m starting to get sick from the stress and fatigue. If she’s in pain, at her age chances are the cause is cancer. It may just be time to say good-bye.

Poor old lady.

3 Comments left on iWeb site

Jennifer

What a tough call on the dog.We were in this boat a few years ago and you are right about when a vet says “expensive” that means it is ridiculously expensive.our dog had a thyroid tumor, i.e. cancer, that spread to her heart.Well once that happens there is no hope.It is sad either way, but it is important that the dog not suffer.And it is hard to tell if a dog is suffering because they can’t talk.Good luck with the dog, that is hard to deal with.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 06:03 PM

Allergies

I went through the same thing with 2 family dogs.It sounds like allergies.I got a lot of help by going to the online medical sites for dogs and humans too.What the vet doesn’t tell you is that dogs can tolerate most of the same medications people do, just in lower doses for their body weight.I would try a childs brand and dosage. Todays dog foods are not very good for your dog.You are better off feeding them meats and oatmeal with fruits and vegetables.or meat and potatoes.An allergy may be to meat also because of the amounts of chemicals they treat foods with today.Have a little patience and you will find the right combination to make your dog feel better.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:11 AM

vh

Alas, this dog isn’t given to allergies. When the Great Dog Food Scare arose, though, I started feeding her and the greyhound real food. They indeed do perform a great deal better on human food: dog food is substandard and provides substandard nutrition.

However, turning out 28 pounds of dog food a week is no joke. Unfortunately, I have a job and I have no partner to help me with shopping, food preparation, and cleanup, and so even if I could afford the cost of buying huge quantities of better food than I eat myself, converting my kitchen into a dog-food factory is not a practical option.

Subsequent trips to the vet show that what’s causing the manifestations of pain is pressure sores. She refuses to lay on her soft blankets–about the middle of last winter, she developed an aversion to dog beds, of which she has a half-dozen scattered around the house and back yard. Washing them did not help. Buying new ones did not help. She is so averse to a soft place to lie down that she will not even walk on them–she walks around them. Lay one down in the hall, and she treats it like a roadblock. As a result she lies on the tile flooring, which is throughout the house. The yard is desert-landscaped, and so there’s no grass to lie on out there.

Pressure sores are extremely difficult to treat, even in humans who can understand instructions not to lie on them. Eventually, they eat through to the bone. They are very painful. They get infected, and such an infection can and will kill the victim. Old folks in poorly maintained nursing homes routinely die of the effects of pressure sores.

There’s evidently nothing I can do about this. I tried tying an object to her torso so that it would force her to lie on her side. This worked for about 30 minutes, after which she just lay down on top of it.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:28 AM

Dog redux

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Seven hundred and eight dollars later. . .

Yes. That’s over seven hundred bucks. So much for the Month of Extreme Frugality. How laughable.

Yesterday I took the dog to a new veterinarian, not feeling at all satisfied with what I got for $430 from my regular vet. When I took her to the the latter vet late last month because she stank so violently you couldn’t stay in the same room with her, he said she had a vaginal infection and gave me a bottle of antibiotic pills and a tube of antibiotic ointment, with instructions to smear it on her nether parts (at great risk to life and limb, we might add). This was a week after he saw her for restlessness and hyperventilation and gave her a cortisone shot to quiet her down. Shortly after I got her home, I found a large lesion on her leg. He-or rather, one of his staff-said he had seen it, it was a pressure sore, and I should put the ointment on that, too.

The sore didn’t get any better, and neither did the stink, to speak of. They charged me another fifty bucks for a second round of antibiotics. On my own, I tried myconozale, which helped a little; the problem was, I couldn’t get the stuff on the dog because she threatens to bite me every time I try to apply anything to the affected area. She has to be muzzled, wrestled down, held down, and medicated. It’s no small trick to do that once, much less several times a day, and I am not of an age to be wrestling on the floor with a ninety-pound dog!

Meanwhile, when I called back about the leg sore, the same unhelpful and vaguely rude staff lady proposed, with a straight face, that I lock her in “a small room” where the floor is padded with several layers of comforters. Well, the only such room in this house is the bathroom where the only truly functional toilet resides. The door opens inward. You can’t pad the floor where the door swings. So I had to drag the dog into the bathroom and then barricade the entrance to the bathroom with a couple of dining room chairs. A German shepherd has no problem moving a couple of chairs out of its way. So I had literally to barricade the door with several dining room chairs, jamming them into the hallway so she couldn’t budge them. As you can imagine, this was not very good for the chairs, my back, or the dog. The only other way to keep her on a padded floor is to tie her to a doorknob and spread the comforters, several layers deep, over an area too large for her to escape.

Neither of these strategies was any too practical.

I also very much doubted that the sore was a pressure sore, because the dog is too active for such a thing to have developed. She’s in motion much of the time and never lies still longer than about four or five hours. I know: that’s about as long as she will allow me to sleep for any given stretch. It’s the wee hours right now, and we’re up.

So I decided to try a friend’s vet.

Well, the place was very impressive-and much, much closer to home. It’s clean, with absolutely no typical veterinary odor. Very spacious and shiny, with several vets and at least a half-dozen staffers that I could see. Meaning, of course, that the practice is cranking the bucks.

Lots of brochures laying around detailing all the expensive things you can do to/for your dog. The basic “senior well dog” checkup is $275, and that’s a fishing expedition that looks for chronic ailments to treat for the rest of the animal’s life. Onward.

The vet was a young woman, very smart. I overwhelmed her with two pages of the dog’s symptoms and four questions:

  • What is the sore on her leg?
  • What can be done about the vaginitis?
  • Why does she pant and hyperventilate constantly?
  • Can she be treated in a reasonable way that does not drive me to wacky behavior like tying the dog to doorknobs and barricading the bathroom with the dining-room furniture?

She examined the dog, shaved the hair off around the irritated rear end, and, having learned to her surprise that the other vet had not done a culture on the diseased area, swabbed up a sample for culturing in a lab. After this, she opined that the lesion is not a pressure sore, because it’s not in an area where a bony prominence comes in contact with the floor and it does not look like a pressure sore. She thinks it’s a hot spot, probably brought on by an insect or spider bite. About the infection, she thinks the dog is in a great deal of pain.

About the heavy breathing, she noted the dog’s nasal secretions are bloody and said she may have a tumor, an expensive item to diagnose and treat. To find out whether she does have nasal cancer, which as it develops is pretty likely, will require a $300 X-ray. If that is positive, the dog will have to be put down.

(As I write this, ominously enough, no air is flowing through the dog’s nose and she’s breathing, loudly, through her mouth.)

The vet then gave me four different medications: a spray, fistfuls of medicated wipes, goop for her rear end, and goop for the sore. She recommended I continue the antibiotics I have until she can get the results of the lab test back, at which time she probably will recommend some other $50 antibiotic. So at this time, the dog is supposed to get FOURTEEN DOSES OF MEDS A DAY. She did, at least, say it is unnecessary to try to force the dog to stay on pads, so I can leave off that aspect of the wacky behavior. IMHO, medicating a dog 14 times a day is quite wacky enough.

At any rate, she charged $278 for all this.

Compared with the other vet’s bill, it seemed like a bargain. Consider:

Vet 1: $430

Services and products:
cursory exam
cortisone shot for agitation
2 bottles of antibiotics
1 tube of ear ointment
not so much as a clue about the leg sore
absurd recommendation for management of leg sore

Vet 2: $278

Services and products:
thorough exam
shaved hair from affected area, allowing access for medicating
lab culture and test
ointment for leg sore
pain-killer for vaginal infection
spray-on antifungal for vaginal infection
antifungal, antiseptic wipes for vaginal infection
consulted at length and made more or less rational recommendations

I said I suspected the dog really does not need Soloxine, because at the time the other vet put her on it, she had no visible symptoms of thyroid dysfunction and because I had learned that hypothyroidism is the most overdiagnosed ailment in veterinary medicine. She said the only way to tell is more bloodwork: $125. To test for thyroid function in the presence of Soloxine, you have to test about 5 hours after the drug has been administered. Since I dose Anna at 6:00 a.m. and it was by then after 3:00 p.m., that scheme was obviated. I’ll have to bring her back another time to find out if she really needs thyroid pills. But first we probably should find out if she has a tumor in her nose, a situation that would do some more obviating.

When I got the dog home, I could not get her out of the car. She couldn’t stand up. She’d jammed herself up against the driver’s seat so that she couldn’t get enough purchase to pull her weakened hindquarters off the floor, and she threatened to bite me when I tried to help her get upright. It looked for a while like I was going to have to drive her back to the vet and have them put her down, right then and there. Finally I pulled the car into the garage and just left her there with the door open and the lights merrily running the battery down. After a half-hour or forty minutes, she managed to get herself up and out of the vehicle.

The four Benadryl I walloped her with an hour ago have finally taken effect. She’s out cold on the floor. On a positive note, she’s now breathing through her nose (more or less), which she was unable to do when she woke me with the steam-engine sound effects. So maybe the nasal problem is just allergies. Probably not, though. You don’t get a bloody discharge from allergies.

My head hurts, my neck hurts, my back aches, my iced tea has gone warm, and even our pet house fly is asleep. Now that it’s quiet, I’m going back to bed.

Month of Extreme Frugality, indeed!

2Commentsleft on iWeb site:

Pinchnickel

Gasp!Have you asked the veterinarians to treat your pooch “pro bono?”I watched a Hollywood TV show, All Things Large and Small, that portrayed veterinarians as compassionate, caring, green-minded people, generous with their time and money.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 – 07:15 AM

vh

Isn’t that the loveliest program? You know, it’s based on a series of semiautobiographical books whose author was an English veterinarian. Each of them is equally delightful.

Veterinarians are compassionate and caring people. But compassionate and caring people have to eat, too. Veterinary school is said to be more difficult to get into than medical school, and the course of studies is extremely challenging. After one of these very bright young people graduates, she or he goes into the business of veterinary care, which IS a business, not a hobby or a charity.

Veterinarians are not in business to give away their skills. They’re in business to make a living. Given how hard they have to work to acquire their skills, they rightly expect to make a good living. Many vets, however, earn only a middle-class income; it’s a lot less profitable than you would think.

Compared to what Vet #1 charged, I felt Vet #2’s fee was pretty reasonable: she devoted a lot of time to examining the dog and talking with me in detail, she provided more medications, and those medications appear to be more specific to the ailments at hand. And she did not leave me in the dark, wondering what is wrong and whether it can be treated at all.

Am I willing to pay $300 to have a 13-year-old German shepherd’s skull X-rayed? The jury is still out on that one. Since I’ve already spent more than half (!!) of this month’s disposable income on the dog, it will have to wait until another couple of paychecks come in, so there’s plenty of time to make a decision.

And at the rate the poor old gal is going, she may not last that long. She has a tough time dragging her crippled hindquarters off the floor, and so frankly, I suspect the end is in sight.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 – 09:06 AM

Twelve ways to save money on your dog

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DCP_13631. Adopt an adult dog.

A grown-up that has already learned to live with humans will save you on furniture and landscaping repair, carpet cleaning, and training. And someone else has paid for spaying or neutering.

2. Choose a breed that is not on the homeowner insurer’s list of breeds that trigger higher premiums.

Avoid German shepherds, Rottweilers, pit bulls, doberman pinschers, chows, huskies, and other dogs with a reputation for unpredictability.

3. Learn to obedience-train your dog in low-cost community classes. Practice obedience training frequently, so the dog will come when called and stop when ordered.

These skills may save your dog from costly accidents or animal attacks, to say nothing of making your own life a lot more pleasant.

4. Keep your dog secured inside a yard with a sturdy, escape-proof fence (not on a tie-out!). When walking outside the yard with your dog, keep the dog on a leash at all times.

This keeps your dog safe from accidents and fights with other dogs and helps protect you and passers-by from dog bites. And that keeps your wallet safe from veterinarians’ and lawyers’ bites.

5. Exercise your dog regularly.

6. Restrict immunizations to those that are absolutely necessary.

Some shots given once a year are really needed only once every two or three years.

7. Learn to give shots yourself.

Vaccines can be purchased at feed stores and online.

8. If you live in an area where there are no mosquitoes, don’t give your dog heartworm meds. If you can’t avoid the monthly worming treatment, purchase Heartgard at Costco, where it’s much cheaper than at most veterinary offices.

9. Read the labels on dog food.

Do not feed your dog corn or corn products: at best, they’re indigestible; many dogs are allergic to corn. Dogs often manifest allergies as ear infections, a direct route for cash to flow from your wallet to your veterinarian’s pocket.

Note what’s in premium dog food and then look for similar formulas in less expensive varieties. For example, Trader Joe’s lamb and rice dog kibble is similar to much pricier premium brands. Also, feed and tack stores often sell premium kibbles at a significant discount from the prices in pet stores.

10. Learn to groom the dog yourself.

Invest in clippers for dogs that need fancy trim jobs and a Dremel to file down heavy claws.

11. Keep your dog’s teeth clean with dental-cleaning dog chews or by brushing the teeth.

12. Abstain from cosmetic surgery such as docking ears, which is cruel and unnecessary.

How Much Is That Doggie in the Window: The cost of owning a pet

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Out of idle curiosity, I ran a Quicken category report for the past 12 years and restricted the categories to one: “Dog.”

According to Quicken, to date I’ve shelled out $8,217 for the privilege of owning a dog—well, for five of those 12 years, two dogs. That doesn’t cover everything. For the first few years of Anna’s residence with me, I didn’t break out every food and toy and miscellaneous expense for the pooch.

And it doesn’t count the leather chair that had to be rebuilt after Anna chewed an arm off it (that was when SDXB started calling her “the thousand-dollar-a-day dog”). Or the carpets that had to be replaced after a long, slow house-training. Or the van I bought to carry her around after she developed a habit of placing her muzzle next to my ear and screaming until my eardrums hurt every time I put her in the car. The Camry I replaced with the gas-guzzling Sienna had at least another five years on it, and it was a great deal more fuel-efficient than the Dog Chariot. If you calculated in the cost of the replacement flooring (all tile) and the larger vehicle and the cost of running said larger vehicle, you’d be looking at, oh, say, another ten grand. That would bring us to something like $18,000 for the pleasure of 12 years of dog company.

Well, it doesn’t match the cost of raising a child. Yet.

But the next time you gaze into two limpid pools of puppy-love eyes, think: this is not a minor undertaking! Bringing a pet into your life is expensive. Vet bills (which can take your breath away-my last bill was $450!) are just barely the half of it. Over time the combined costs can add up to something very, very large.

Would all that money have gone into savings? Probably not. It likely would have been diddled away on living expenses. I do have to say, though, that if I hadn’t had that $450 vet bill, the larder would have been quite a bit fuller in the month I had to pay it. Yes. It would have been nice not to have to go hungry, or to raid retirement savings, to pay for the cost of owning a dog.

Anna is very elderly and frail. She won’t last much longer, alas. It makes me very sad. I can hardly imagine what my life will be like without a furry companion.

Still, when I contemplate the possibility of adopting another dog after she’s gone, I have to ask myself: can I afford another $18,000? Or even $8,217? When I’m 70-something and scraping by on Social Security, will I be able to take care of a dog?

I don’t think so. In fact, the cost of pet ownership is rapidly moving beyond the means of the average middle-class American. At one point, I estimated that a single person would need an annual income of at least $80,000 to own a dog without having to tighten her belt now and then. Possibly a two-earner household could afford an animal more comfortably. But for single middle-class earners, dogs are about on the order of horses: an indulgence for the wealthy.

How much do you spend on your pets? Do you think this is affordable in today’s economy?

Chicken soup for dog-lovers

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Anna H. Banana is looking a little peppier today, after having been off her feed for quite a while. The other day it occurred to me that if chicken soup is Jewish penicillin for people, maybe it would perk up another mammalian species. So I took a few chicken thighs out of the freezer, which I happened to have in lifetime-supply quantities thanks to a bargain purchase, tossed them in a saucepan and covered with water, and added a little salt and a little sugar, and simmered.

Sugar and salt, because she was so peakèd she wasn’t even drinking much water. Suspecting she was getting dehydrated, I wanted to slip her a dose of electrolytes. The beauty of chicken thighs for making a small amount of broth is that they have only one large bone. Getting the cooked meat off is easy—no dodging splintery little bones and sinews.

After an hour or so, I dipped a couple of cups of broth and meat into the dog bowl, stirred in a few ice cubes to cool it to a temperature on the high side of lukewarm, and served it up to the aged Queen of the Galaxy.

She inhaled the stuff! After a couple more meals like that, she began to eat her regular food again, especially if it was made soupy by the addition of lots of broth.

Discovery: Dogs like chicken soup.

Discovery: Dogs like their food warm. Try zapping a little dog food (not kibble) in the micro until it’s warm but not hot. Works.

Discovery: Dogs that hate kibble will eat it if it’s floating in broth.

Normally I don’t feed her much kibble, but if I’m broke or under the weather myself so that I can’t buy or prepare two pounds of food a day for Her Dogship, we don’t have much choice. She’s a lot more likely to eat it if it’s drowned in chicken, lamb, or beef broth.

Chicken broth is easy to make, with thighs, legs, or wings or with bones and carcasses from several meals stashed in the freezer until you’re ready to cook. Just cover them with water, bring to a boil, and turn down the heat to a slow simmer. Pour the cooked broth through a strainer to remove bones. Just now a big pot with three carcasses and bones saved from cut-rate beef roasts that were converted into hamburger is bubbling away on the stove. You can sometimes get lamb necks on sale—dogs really like lamb. There’s only one caveat, and it’s important:

Do not add onions!

Onions are toxic to dogs. Onions themselves are especially bad, but all members of the onion family (garlic, shallots, little green onions, chives) can do the job on your dog. They cause a kind of anemia that can kill the animal—I can testify to this, because I put some onions in meat I was feeding and almost did in two ninety-pound dogs. The smaller the dog, the more vulnerable it is to onion toxicity. For this reason, it’s not a good idea to dose your dog’s food with canned chicken or beef broth, which almost always contains onion.

To make a tastier broth for human purposes, brown some chopped onion, celery, and carrot (any or all) in another pan. Add some garlic if desired and then dip a portion of the broth into the pan. Simmer for an hour or more. Strain into a clean bowl, pressing juices out of vegetables. Et voilà! Dog joy and chicken soup for humans from one set of bones.

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