| Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44441] |
Tue, 23 August 2011 19:15  |
 b_twin_1
Messages: 2620
Registered: September 2008
Location: Victoria, Australia |
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Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera
I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel ~ Blackadder
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44445 is a reply to message #44441 ] |
Wed, 24 August 2011 00:43  |
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Diane in MN
Messages: 2756
Registered: October 2008
Location: Twin Cities, MN, USA |
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This post made me laugh, but in the spirit of "laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone." I don't have too much trouble with Teddy these days, but I don't mess with what works, either. The SAME bowl in the SAME place for EVERY meal, and don't do anything unusual while he's eating, is the rule. As food rituals go, this is a piece of cake and I am grateful for it every day.
I know they do this deliberately. I know this.
Yup.
To the extent that they like any foodlike matter they quite like liver, and I briefly had hopes of desiccated liver. Nah.
I've had the same experience. Freeze-dried chicken is a non-starter with my guys, too. String cheese, however, is a hit.
Darkness had what I call colic, which is that his stomach makes loud, horrible noises
Ah yes, borborygmus. I use Gas-X for this and it's pretty effective. Given that Danes are poster dogs for bloat, Gas-X is a constant in my dog medicine chest.
"The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough . . . " Louise Erdrich
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44449 is a reply to message #44448 ] |
Wed, 24 August 2011 12:08 |
Birdreader
Messages: 48
Registered: August 2011
Location: Chicago |
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The reason that the put it out is that they expect you to eat it and then have to buy more candy for the trick or treaters.
Birdreader
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44452 is a reply to message #44441 ] |
Wed, 24 August 2011 16:44 |
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Hmmm Don't have much advice here, the only finicky eaters I have encountered are children, and usually bribes worked best with them.
Being happy doesn't mean everything's perfect, it means you decided to look beyond the imperfections.
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44453 is a reply to message #44441 ] |
Wed, 24 August 2011 19:22 |
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Melissa Mead
Messages: 997
Registered: October 2008
Location: Albany, NY, USA |
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Our cat Alias sometimes refuses her food, and when she does eat she has the weirdest ritual. When she's done eating, she'll move around her bowl and scratch like she's burying the food (although there's nothing there but a mat.)
North: scratch, scratch, scratch.
East: scratch, scratch, scratch.
South: scratch, scratch, scratch.
West: scratch, scratch, scratch.
And then she'll turn her back on it and walk away.
Member of Carpe Libris: http://carpelibris.wordpress.com/
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44467 is a reply to message #44441 ] |
Thu, 25 August 2011 08:09 |
ownedbycats
Messages: 12
Registered: August 2011 |
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If it makes you feel better the not eating a particular kind of food after having stomach troubles is a common canine reaction. Canines of all species (dog, coyote, wolf, etc.) have an instinct that tells them that if they get sick right after eating something they shouldn't eat that kind of food anymore. I had just finished reading Dog Sense by John Bradshaw* where I picked up this particular tidbit of information, when my dog ate something she shouldn't have right before supper, then had her supper, THEN got sick. All of a sudden she wouldn't eat her regular food. Nothing would convince her to put a single kibble of that kind of food anywhere near her mouth. (And usually the only thing that stops my dog eating is extreme heat.) We had to switch to another food to get her to eat again. The hellhounds' problems sound more complicated that just: ate this, got sick, won't eat this anymore, but maybe this is contributing to the problem.
*If you can get past the first several (all right, two or three but it felt like several) chapters on evolution the rest of the book is an overview of the newest studies on how dogs learn and interact with other dogs and people. Really fascinating, and he mostly refrained from using overly scientific language.
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44468 is a reply to message #44467 ] |
Thu, 25 August 2011 12:28 |
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equus_peduus
Messages: 437
Registered: September 2009
Location: France |
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| ownedbycats wrote on Thu, 25 August 2011 05:09 |
Canines of all species (dog, coyote, wolf, etc.) have an instinct that tells them that if they get sick right after eating something they shouldn't eat that kind of food anymore.
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Actually, this is true in lots of species - it's called a learned food aversion (not sure how much is instinct, and how much is just relatively fast associative learning). Cats are masters at this - and they don't have to vomit, they just need to be stressed out or not feeling well - they figure the food is why they aren't feeling well so they won't ever eat that food again. People can do this too - as evidenced by a friend of mine who used to love movie theater popcorn, ate some when when was already feeling under the weather, and then barfed it all up later... she won't go near it any more, and it's been over ten years.
This theory also doesn't explain why some dogs will barf, then immediately eat their vomitus... ick.
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44498 is a reply to message #44467 ] |
Fri, 26 August 2011 21:26 |
EMoon
Messages: 669
Registered: March 2009 |
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On dogs not eating what they just threw up...I had a collie who would urp up anything new, give it a look, and then gulp it down again. (I hope it's not too cruel to mention a dog who would eat almost anything, and thus helped markedly with the household leftovers.) Leftover hamburger complete with mayonnaise, mustard, lettuce, tomatoes, etc.? Snatch, gulp down, return to sender, inspect, gulp again. Next time he begged a bite of a similar burger, no urp. This dog also picked oranges off our tree then sucked the juice out. Made his fluffy "britches" messy, but he liked the taste and would stand on his hind legs and paw the branches to get to the higher oranges when we picked off the low ones to keep him from them. None of our other dogs ever ate oranges. Very rarely he'd refuse something (the time I made cream puffs the "easy" way--using Wesson Oil instead of melting solid shortening...they were like cobbles. The hardness didn't defeat him--he was a good bone-cruncher--but the taste...bleh.)
E
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44500 is a reply to message #44491 ] |
Fri, 26 August 2011 23:18 |
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| Aaron wrote on Fri, 26 August 2011 13:47 |
Always supposing I were of a scale where the vibrations from a three kilogram bird would be perceptible. I imagine the fern rhizomes were quaking in fear.
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This somehow reminded me of the delightful poem Humming-bird by D.H. Lawrence.
"We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,
Luckily for us." 
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44525 is a reply to message #44517 ] |
Sun, 28 August 2011 10:54 |
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shalea
Messages: 785
Registered: October 2008
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina, ... |
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| Mrs Redboots wrote on Sun, 28 August 2011 08:34 |
| shalea wrote on Sat, 27 August 2011 11:53 |
I generally describe a heron's mode of ambulation as "storking" rather than "stalking" -- it's not strictly accurate as a stork is a different sort of bird, but it sounds like a heron's motion looks...
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Obviously someone who uses a rhotic dialect of English - to me, non-rhotic, the two are homonyms!
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And though I work with a number of non-rhotic speakers, that had never occurred to me!
[Updated on: Sun, 28 August 2011 10:55]
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| Re: Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera [message #44546 is a reply to message #44479 ] |
Mon, 29 August 2011 00:07 |
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Diane in MN
Messages: 2756
Registered: October 2008
Location: Twin Cities, MN, USA |
Senior Member |
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I don't necessarily expect bloat with rumbling guts, nor do they signal an inevitable bout of diarrhea, but I do associate them with gas. When I can hear someone's innards from across the room, someone gets Gas-X, whether he or she is looking or acting uncomfortable or not. There's an acupressure point near the stifle that I use if anyone's stomach strikes my neurotic brain as being a little tense. And I take great comfort from the presence of an emergency clinic fifteen minutes away.
"The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough . . . " Louise Erdrich
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