Fridays are Golden

Our Lucy is a warm, loving, affectionate, and obedient dog. She is not a mellow dog. She goes at almost everything with speed. When the dogs are running, Ellie paces herself and goes the distance. Lucy, on the other hand, sprints like crazy until she is so tired she has to stop.

Like most Golden Retrievers, our dogs seem to lack a satiety center. They will immediately consume any food that is given to them. Lucy is even worse than most. She gulps down her food in a matter of seconds. By doing that, she sometimes takes in a lot of air which leads to GI discomfort and occasionally urgent loose stools.

Our veterinarian advised us to slow down the pace at which Lucy eats her food. He suggested several remedies.

This is the food/water tray Lucy has used since she outgrew her puppy bowl:

And this is the new feeding dish, one of the options our vet suggested. Made of non-stick metal, the dish has three projections in the middle of the dish. They are sufficiently close together that a dog cannot grab large amounts of food at once and wolf it down. Additionally, the dish is more narrow at the top and wider at the base.

When we put the dish in place, Lucy looked rather puzzled.

Where's my bowl?

Lucy gets one cup of food for breakfast and another cup for dinner. To further slow her eating, we put only half a cup in the new dish at one time. When she consumes that we give her the other half.

If you enlarge this one, you can see Lucy's tongue wrapping around the projections in the dish.

In order to get all the food, she had to keep moving to different areas of the dish. It was rather amusing to see Ellie. She ate her food at her normal pace, which is considerably slower than Lucy. She seemed puzzled that Lucy was still eating, since Lucy always finishes first and comes over to watch Ellie eat. In the past, if we didn't monitor the whole thing Lucy would help Ellie finish her dinner. And Ellie would let her.
We are delighted with the dish and time will tell if it solves her problems. We already know it slows her down and that is a good thing.

This morning I had the television on while I ate breakfast. The following "news" items were discussed:

1) 20% of Pakistan is under water from flooding

2) More than a thousand people are missing and 337 people are dead from landslides in China

3) The citizens of the town of Ames, Iowa are without water after record-breaking floods caused city water mains to break.

4) A frustrated flight attendant "lost it" and screamed profanities over the planes loud speaker; then he opened the emergency exit, lowered the evacuation shoot and slid down to the tarmac.

I don't have to tell you which story got the most reporting. That says so many things about the media and what people apparently want to hear. And what it says is very frightening indeed. So this weekend, reflect on your own priorities and concerns. When you figure them out, act on them.

It's Friday the 13th. I'm not a superstitious person by nature, but be careful out there.


This photograph comes from "I can haz hot dog."

Here's hoping you will find joy as we bear yet another hot and steamy weekend. Let the work go and just relax. It's too hot to do anything else.

HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND, EVERYONE