Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
My canine companion, eight-year-old Giggles, the Poodle, constantly follows anyone who has food.
Children she is particularly fond of as they have a tendency to leave crumbs and leftover food scattered around the house.
She will be lurking around the table when you’re eating and gazing at you with soulful eyes as you dunk a digestive into a cup of tea, look longingly at your spaghetti bolognese (her personal favourite) and, if all else fails, she will finish off any leftover cat food.
But when faced with dog food, canned, dried or freshly-frozen, from the cheapest to the ludicrously expensive, she looks at me despairingly.
She refuses to eat dog food.
I know the reason why she is refusing to eat, if I offered my children the option of spinach or a Smartie, they would choose the Smartie, so unless there is 100 per cent compliance from the entire family, no bits of bacon for breakfast, steak or chicken for dinner, biscuit crumbs, half-eaten sandwiches, we haven’t a chance at getting Giggles weaned onto proper dog food.
But then there is the dog that actually is perpetually hungry, and will wolf down anything including the cheapest dog food on the planet willingly. Labradors, from the day they’re born to the day they die want to eat something, apparently they’ve got three genes that don’t switch off when they’ve had a meal, so they’re constantly hungry and will eat anything given the chance.
Out dog walking recently, I watched a friend’s Labrador escaping to sporadically pick up a stone and chomp happily down on it. Apparently, this is a condition known as pica - habitually eating non-edible items. Some dogs have ingested tennis balls or underwear, and the cause can be a serious health condition.
Last year a German Shepherd had an operation to remove six golf balls in his stomach and a few days ago, the owners of Maisy, an eight-year-old St Bernard, were faced with the prospect of losing their pet when a scan showed a mass on her spleen, which led the vet to believe it was cancer. The dog was rushed in for surgery and when the vets operated they found that Maisy had managed to swallow four stuffed teddy bears. Not an easy feat.
So, although we will be making an effort to improve Giggle’s diet, maybe it’s not that bad after all.
