Is that soap opera still extant? Days of Our Lives… A fine time-waster, right up there with Facebook and Twaddle and Google News. 😀
So here’s a question: how do dogs KNOW you’re touching food when they’re around the corner and cannot see you, and when you have not introduced any new food smells into the environment?
There are only two possibilities: either they can hear your fingers moving or they have dog-lepathy. My money is on the second: the beasts can read your mind faster and more accurately than a mosquito can. And as anyone who has ever tried to swat a mosquito senses, few creatures are more telepathic than those bugs.
At breakfast time I usually set a small package of blueberries on the table, first because I like to munch them and second because I use them as high-quality dog treats. This morning after sponging a few of those and a few pieces of kibble (also used as bribes), Ruby retreats to the kitchen, there to perform the wacky little dance she uses to lobby for a higher-value treat: to wit, a strip of chicken jerky. The human is not getting off its duff: the stubborn creature persists in chowing down on its own food while reading the current issue of The Economist and ignoring the puppy.
With Ruby out of the line of sight on the far side of a set of kitchen cabinets, the human reaches for a blueberry.
Like a SHOT the dog is at the table, the familiar look of expectant joy beaming from her furry little face.
HOW DID SHE KNOW? I didn’t touch the plastic. I’m wearing nothing that can rustle with movement, and even if I were, how would she know what movement was made? I have not bitten into the berry and so have not released any delicious parfum de myrtille.
Really. Seriously. There is no other explanation than dog-lepathy. The damn dog reads minds.
Cassie the (Ailing) Corgi seems…sorta OK today. Not so very bad off. Not so great. Both hounds are both off snoozing just now. Just as with cats, dog life seems to consist mostly of lobbying for food, eating, and sleeping.
She coughed a little this morning, so I sprang the Robitussin DM on her. That was a trip! 😀
Go ahead…just TRY to dose your dog with red-dyed artificially sweetened goop flavored with essence de faux fraises! You never saw so much red sticky stuff all over the floor since the time you dropped a mixing bowl full of freshly mixed cherry Jell-O on the floor when you were eight years old!
She just walked in to deliver some barking. And happily enough, she can bark without falling into a coughing frenzy now. That surely is some kind of progress. She’s looking more and more emaciated, though, which is progress of a different sort, I expect. In a different direction.
The other day I was wondering when it was that I first noticed Cassie was beginning to take on the old-dog look. And lo! WordPress conjured the answer at the end of yesterday’s whinge, in the list of “related posts” it automatically generates. It was just short of a year ago: late December, 2017.
Cassie came along in June of 2008, at which time the Humane Society claimed she was two years old. Those rescue society estimates are usually pulled out some volunteer’s tail end, so anything’s possible…even the possibility that she was more like three. Until very recently, she’s been exuberantly healthy, so it would be easy to figure she was younger than she might have been. But by last December, she was starting to take on that “old dog” look, graying a bit around the schnozz, beginning to look a little sunken around the eyes. If she was sick, though, it didn’t show in her behavior.
Next year is 2019. So if she lives that long — and if we believe she was two when I got her — then she’ll be about 13 next year. That is longer than any of my canine room-mates have ever held forth, with the possible exception of Greta the GerShep. I guessed Greta was about seven when I inherited her from the neighbors. But those people were exceptionally feckless. My guess assumed they got her when she was a small pup, but neither of her adult humans was competent to train her as smoothly and perfectly as she was trained. Greta, of course, was a genius among dogs. But even geniuses must have some sort of learning curve. She could have been a year or two old when they got her from someone who knew what they were doing, in which case she was well over 12 when she shuffled off this mortal coil.
But otherwise, I’ve never had a dog live longer than 12 years. One died of a spinal tumor. Others just expired when they reached what for a large dog is old age. Anna was a wreck when I finally dragged her into the death chamber. And I’m afraid that will be true of Cassie, unless we’re lucky and she dozes off into the other world during the night.
The weather is beautiful. I should go out and buy a flat or two of flowers. But of course that would entail getting up and moving around.