Yogurt head

I have a friend who claims to know some people who recently acquired a dog for garbage disposal. The trash services in their complex were poor, and so these folks supposedly were feeding all their scraps to the dog. My friend and I could hardly believe it, but she insisted she’d heard it from a credible source.

Steve and I feed Tucker small bits of leftover food now and then, but it’s never much. We don’t want him to get fat. And for our CCI puppies, we would no more substitute human food for their prescribed Eukanuba Large Breed Puppy Chow than we’d allow them to roam the streets alone at night.

Still, there are gray zones within the realm of CCI-puppy-human-food contact. The organization makes it clear that pups can be given small amounts of peanut butter in certain toys (like Kongs). Our puppy instructors refer to the benefits of sometimes using “high-value treats” as rewards for challenging tasks. We take that to mean bits of real meat.

In that context, I saw nothing wrong yesterday with giving Kyndall the quart-size yogurt container. I’d cleaned it out at lunchtime, and only the thinnest smear of plain yogurt remained inside. I knew she’d be transfixed by it — a puppy toy of the highest value.

She instantly carried it to a nearby rug and settled down to work on removing every remaining yogurt molecule.

Unlike some dogs we’ve had, who never figured out how to restrain things they wanted to lick, Kyndall has already mastered using her paws for that purpose. But quickly, she moved on to paw-free exploration of the carton interior.

Of course we should have seen the next thing coming.

 

What fascinated me was that she didn’t panic. Was she inhaling? Savoring residual yogurt vapors? Wondering where everyone else in the pack went? I removed the carton, and she continued sitting calmly. A play session to remember.