annie

New way to eat

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So, as a kid, you know when your parents told you to do something that you didn't want to do? You really, really, really didn't want to do it?

At some point during your attempts to negotiate not doing that which you really really really didn't want to do, you somehow realized that, if you did it, and did it poorly, your parents (most likely your mother) would probably never ask you to do it again.

The trick was to do it so poorly that there would be no hope ever of your learning how to do that which you really, really, really didn't want to do.

Unless you had parents who took such a poor performance as a educational challenge, you were set, once you did it poorly the first time.

That's what I was thinking about when I fed the dogs today.

I was hoping that, by feeding the dogs the "wrong" way, Kris would decide that he, and only he, would be allowed to feed the dogs.

I didn't succeed, but I did have two very happy doggies:

An Annie curl

Daily Photo

Not that you can really tell from the way she curls, but Annie has a back injury that's preventing her from running and jumping. Not sure when it happened, but we think around Christmas time.

So wrong

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Oh, goodness, I was so wrong about Annie.

Kris took her to the vet's this morning as I dashed off to this morning's Master Gardener hotline. Annie has still been having problems walking and has refused to jump up onto the couch or the bed or anything. She didn't run much at the park, either time we went yesterday, so something was definitely still up.

Well, we found out today.

The vet took x-rays of her back end. Turns out, she has both a bad hip which will cause problems in the upcoming years, and a back injury. Two spine discs are compressed causing severe inflamation in her back.

No more running around. No more all day hikes. No more playing with Blue. No more chasing the red bone. None of the fun stuff.

Poor Annie girl.

Annie, unplugged

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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.

YKD: wet

You Know Dog

you'd be a lot more comfortable and a lot less wet if you'd just let me dry you off with a towel.

Annie's hands

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Annie is a smart dog. I would argue too smart, certainly for her own good. She can do the usual smart-dog tricks like open various doors by pushing them open, or bump them to swing open. She can also pull a door if there's food on the other side of the door. Food: Annie's biggest motivator.

Annie can, and has, opened up peanut butter jars. She recognizes the jar, most likely by smell, and is always hovering around when I'm spreading peanut butter on my bananas or apples. She opened the jar once by putting both front paws around the jar, hands-like, and hooking her teeth on the ridges of the lid. She then twisted the lid off, turning it bit by bit.

Once I recognized what she'd done, I couldn't help but wonder just what kind of demon dog we had. I mean, other than a really smart demon dog.

A really smart demon dog with hands.

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