Life with Hellhounds: the soap opera

 

 

I am very short of sleep.  Why, you might ask, am I very short of sleep?  Because I FORGOT that one of the reasons my days keep running later and later and later has something to do with . . . hellhounds. 

Diane in MN wrote a few days ago, in response to this in a blog post:  

I put the food down, they looked at it and . . . there was an instant slump and a backing nervously away, looking uneasily over their shoulders and exchanging anxious glances. I let this go on for thirty seconds or so and then took pity and put the bowls back in their corner. Back in the corner and CORRECTLY ALIGNED. Then they fell on it like ravening fiends.

I once tried to feed Teddy–this was after . . . he was eating regularly–out of a differently-shaped bowl. He gave it one look and fled. ::HEADDESK::

There's a cartoon by Charles Barsotti that perfectly illustrates this trauma. This is not fiction, folks.

(I don't trust multiply copied links, so here it is again:)   http://www.barsotti.com/pup5.html 

No, it is not fiction.  But ah, but would it were even that simple, which Diane among others could affirm . . . that it isn't.  One of my guys' many peculiarities is that there are levels of eating and not-eating.  If they are briefly attaining the heights of normal dogness they will even eat in the middle of the floor.  They had one of those moments last night at dinner.  They came roaring out of the dog bed when I did my phony 'oh goodie look here's dinner' chirrup.  And while I looked on in stunned amazement, they swallowed everything on offer in about thirty seconds.  Wow.  Spectacular. 

            This is, however, a highly unusual sighting—approximately equivalent to a takahe in a Hampshire garden.  Usually hellhounds don't bother coming into the middle of the floor in the first place.  Usually I have to caaaaaall them as they press themselves into the shadows in the back of the dog bed.  Sometimes calling degenerates into ordering, as a hellgoddess might order a superfluous hellslave to jump into the (nearly) bottomless ravine and be eaten by basilisks.  Darkness comes out first, slinking and reluctant, and collapses in his Food Corner, where the wall with the piano on the other side of it meets the refrigerator.*  Lately, in a new manoeuvre to drive me farther around the twist than I already am,  he has taken to having a casual but thorough stretch—front first, then rear, then a full-body shake—the whole process takes a good minute—before finally resigning himself to putting his back to the wall and facing the dreadful approach of the Food Bowl.

            At this point Chaos crawls out of the dog bed, very nearly on his belly, head, ears and tail flattened in full please-don't-beat-me-I-am-a-poor-abject-creature posture.  He usually hides behind my chair and stares at me hopelessly—portrait of loyal dog desperate to please cruel, incomprehensible owner—as I set THE BOWL OF FOOD down in front of him. . . .

            They may eat.  They may not.  If they don't, it's a question of how long I wait before I . . . move the bowls.   I discovered this stratagem by accident, trying to find the correct alignment, since in my life with dogs I've met quite a few who demand their bowls to be in the RIGHT PLACE, rather like people who will only eat their hamburgers with ketchup.**  I have no idea what's going on in the labyrinthine hellhound minds, but I have learnt from experience that if they haven't eaten after several minutes in one location, they aren't going to.  And so, rather in the nature of using an egg-beater on the slush in the freezer trays so you will end up with ice cream instead of a brick, I interrupt the hardening process and move them. 

            Generally speaking we have two positions:  In Bed and Out of Bed.  On an only mildly dysfunctional day, this is enough.  If we start Out of Bed, they will suddenly decide to eat after all when they are put In Bed.  Or vice versa.  Sometimes it takes a third move:  in-out-in is usually more successful than out-in-out but it varies.*** 

            Sometimes it takes a fourth move.  Sometimes . . . and at about this point I start looking for fresh locations.  But this is a tricky gambit—especially in small houses with limited floorspace.  You can't just cavalierly pick up hellhound food bowls and march them into another room.  Well . . . you can do anything you like with the bowls, but the hellhounds will be at the back of the dog bed again and it will take a winch to get them out.

            Where was I?  —Why I am short of sleep.  Night before last, after eating both lunch and dinner with relatively little faffing around, I was expecting no particular flapdoodle for post-midnight supper.  Wrong.†  But that was Sunday night, after the Quarter Peal That Wasn't, and I wanted to go to bed.  I had a voice lesson to pull myself together for.  So I said to myself, it won't kill them to miss a meal. . . .

            Well, it didn't kill them.  But in the morning Darkness had what I call colic, which is that his stomach makes loud, horrible noises, he is clearly not his best and won't eat.  He was lethargic on the morning hurtle, and his evacuations were not pleasing.  Of course he wouldn't eat lunch.  Fortunately my voice lesson was later than usual yesterday which gave me time to argue with him.  This involves descriptions of the hearth-rug I am going to make of his skin, moving him in (and out of) fresh corners where usually only the spiders hold sway, and working my way through the short list of homeopathic remedies I've compiled over the years, one of which sometimes works.††  Yes.  He ate.  Finally.

            Last night when they both refused to eat their late supper again there was no way I was going to go through all this again.  So I was up till the frelling birds††† again.  Yes.  They ate.  And I slept through my alarm and woke to the sound of Atlas knocking on the door, I having told him I would be up at an almost normal hour this morning.

            Hellhounds have been blithe and jolly—and eating—so far today.  So far.  I'm going to start late supper earlier tonight.‡

Maybe I'll wait till tomorrow to tell you about my surreal experience of trying to sign up with audible.‡‡   By tomorrow I should also know if it worked.  

 * * *

* Need I mention that YOU MAY NOT OPEN THE REFRIGERATOR WHILE THE HELLHOUND IS EATING.  But you knew that, right?

            I admit I've never tried playing the piano.  For some reason I feel this is not an experiment worth making. 

** Back in the days when I ate either hamburgers or ketchup, I was one of them. 

*** This may be more apparent than real anyway.  Traditionally their best meal is dinner.  Dinner usually starts Out of Bed because I still naively feel that eating Out of Bed is the paradigm we are still striving for.  But because lunch tends to be a loaded gun pressed to my forehead anyway I usually start them In Bed. 

† I know they do this deliberately.  I know this.  

†† My impression is that what works is two-phase:  first I have to make the colic go away, and then I have to convince him to disturb the pleasant new sensation in his belly with that dangerously insurrectionist substance, food.  I should be able to do this with one remedy, but I haven't found that one remedy yet.  Dosing critters is a ratbag because they can't tell you what's going on—but you can usually see the critter cheering up when something works. 

††† Possibly including a takahe 

‡ On the last forum hellhound blog thread there's been another conversation about dog training, and clicker training always comes up.  Yup.  Clicker training is great, if you have a critter that will respond to anything as a reward.  My guys would prefer not to eat at all, so treats are out^ and their favourite toy is me.  One of the good things about hellhounds as companions as that they don't require a lot of stimulation—sleep, hurtling, and quality petting time are all that's necessary—but there's always a down side.  

^ To the extent that they like any foodlike matter they quite like liver, and I briefly had hopes of desiccated liver.  Nah.  

‡‡ http://www.audible.co.uk/