Annie, unplugged

Annie has become quite the svelte dog. Her muscles bulge when she runs. You can see her chest muscles as she's lost all of her doggy fat, all of the soft parts of her body.

We feed Annie the same amount of food that we feed Bella: different formula, butthe same amount. Annie, however, runs around a lot more than Bella does. Sure, when we go for a walk, both the dogs and I all walk the same distance. When we go to a park, however, Annie runs around. When we go on a hike, Kris, Andy, Bella, Shadow and I walk x distance, Blue walks 2x distance, and Annie runs about 4x distance. She burns a lot of calories.

She's also very, very, very food motivated. Too much so in my opinion. I hate that she's always scavenging for food.

When we arrived home from Christmas, I thought she looked particularly lanky, so I thought to help her out: I decided to feed her more than her normal amount of food. She burns off the calories, what can it hurt?

Instead of her normal one scoop of food, I gave her three scoops of food for dinner, might have been four. She devoured it. Hoovered it. Ten seconds, it was gone.

Okay, clearly she can eat that much. I gave her that much again the next morning.

Well, last night, she wasn't doing so well. If Kris or I touched her along her back, she yelped. She wasn't able to jump up onto the couch, nor down from the couch. Come dinner time, she wasn't particularly interested in food, but was plenty interested in eating grass in the back.

Hmmmmm.... grass.... upset stomach. Crap.

I admitted to Kris this morning that Annie might be plugged up. "Plugged up? Why?" he asked. Well, see, you know, um...

Eventually, I confessed. I told him I had overfed the dog and maybe her intestines were impacted. Okay, he'd try to get a Saturday morning appointment with the vet.

I thought I'd try an old-fashioned way of unplugging her. I took her to the part this afternoon and let her run around. She managed all of maybe 20 yards before she stopped a took a dump. A spectacularly large one (lovely blogging material, that Annie). In the minute it took me to clean it up (and the next five it took me to clean up some other flippin' moronic dog owner's dog poop because he was too freakin' lazy to frackin' do it himself, thereby risking my ability to take my (Kris'?) dogs to the school because of his laziness), Annie had dashed off to the edge of the school yard and dumped again.

Well, there we go.

After that, she was happy as a clam, running around again, sniffing things, jumping up.

Apparently Annie's dog food is her goldfish. Need to get more fiber into that dog...

Or less food.

In one sitting.