JOHN SYKES JR.

My dog had to take his medication, in this case a pill. While the ailment was nothing to fret about, the pill still had to go down. Luckily, he has a certain weakness.

It was a big pill, a chalky tablet about the diameter of a dime and twice as thick.

The thing was surprisingly strong, but luckily it had one of those break-in-two furrows, so I didn’t have to demonstrate my lack of strength in front of my muscled-up dog.

My dependent, the dog Winston, has a inordinately strong affection for American cheese, especially the individually wrapped slices. They’re fresher, if that is possible with processed cheese food.

So, I exploit this cheese fetish to administer medication. The sound of crinkly plastic being pulled from the rubbery cheese of brings him trotting into the room. It’s through this process that Winston demonstrates his uncanny canine auditory gifts.

I can unwrap bread, salami, anything that’s wrapped in plastic, and he almost always ignores that. Open up the plastic-explosive-like cheese and he appears instantaneously at my side, giving me one of those alert, I’m-ready-to-save-someone-from-a-burning-building looks.

So he hasn’t caught onto the cheese-means-pill correlation, probably because I dish out the cheese randomly, just to keep him honest.

This time though, there he was, gazing eagerly up into my eyes. He knows with mathematical certainty that I won’t NOT give him some … we have an unspoken agreement. Which is: I feed him, he barks at the appropriate times.

I began to embed the pills. Oddly the cheese isn’t is malleable as one would think. Tremendous pressure is needed to make it stay together, especially with a large chunk of pill in it.

The ritual is this: One chunk of cheese is used for the pill, the rest is used to first prime the pump.

I toss small pieces of cheese his way. His lust for cheese makes him snap the pieces out of the air like a gator going for a gopher.

Strangely and almost every time we play this little game, the first piece I throw his way he doesn’t catch. The cheese bounces off his head while he stares curiously at it. He lets it fall to the ground. Then he eats it. Why this is, I don’t know. It smells like cheese, it looks like cheese… it even sounds like cheese.

But after this first drop, he eagerly catches the cheese in mid-air.

The thinking is this: He gets so excited he swallows the cheese whole … no chewing. No chewing, no bad pill taste. Undetected pill is down, he gets cheese, and everyone’s happy.

But sometimes … it doesn’t work. His keen nose ferrets out the pill, seemingly in mid-air. He catches the cheese, holds it in his mouth for a second and lets it fall to the floor, drool-covered and disgusting.

I have to dig the pill out of the slimy cheese and begin the process again.

On this day, the above procedure worked for the first half of the pill. It went in and down.

The other pill-half refused to fool him. Into his mouth and out. In and out. The cheese was beginning to dissolve in the unsavory chemistry of his saliva, so I went to Plan B. Most pet owners know Plan B, especially cat owners. I would have to use force. Because it’s for their own good.

In short the plan is this: Pry the beast’s jaws open, insert the pill, close the beast’s jaws, hold the jaws closed, encourage the beast to swallow.

I don’t do this often enough to spook Winston, so he doesn’t bolt when I approach him to implement this plan. I levered his mouth open, stuck the pill chunk in there, clamped his snout closed and watched while he swallowed.

This procedure went well. I gave a grunt of satisfaction and turned to the faucet to rinse the slime from my hands.

I glanced back at him. He was staring at me with a beatific gaze. Then, with liquid grace, the pill chunk dropped from his drooling mouth, landing on the floor with a soggy click.

He trotted away, half medicated.

The fight isn’t over of course, but I’ll give Winston this round.

I’ll fool him later though.

I’ll go to Plan C.

Winston suns on a blazing hot July day in Little Rock.

]]> http://fatdog.501pets.com/?feed=rss2&p=47 0 http://fatdog.501pets.com/?p=44 http://fatdog.501pets.com/?p=44#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:12:09 +0000 kwilliams http://fatdog.501pets.com/?p=44 JOHN SYKES JR.

I recently helped my dad and sister take their dog Buddy to the vet. Routine stuff, an annual sort of thing, a worm check and other nasty stuff like that. No big deal, except for the car problem.

Buddy’s original delivery to my dad from the Humane Society went well. He was quiet, didn’t thrash around and languidly stretched out on the back seat.

The only hiccup? Throw up. Calmly and without drama he emptied his stomach onto the back seat of my car. Fortunately a generous spread of towels covered the seat because I’ve had dogs throw up in my car before.

So I was afraid we might get the same action on this vet trip. But I wasn’t as afraid… we weren’t taking my car.

The problem, the reason they needed help, wasn’t doggie vomit. Buddy would not willingly get into dad’s car or any car for that matter. He would approach, sniff the air around the car, but no amount of coaxing would get him inside.

Buddy had grown a little larger from what most agreed would be a solid 35-pound dog.

I bent down to pick him up, and he weighed in at somewhat over 60 pounds.

I was there as muscle: Grasp the dog around the chest and hind legs, then heft him up and into the car.

He didn’t struggle, but it was obvious he didn’t want to be there. We kept telling him it was for his own good, but he seemed doubtful.

The short trip went well; none of us were trampled, clawed up or secreted on in any way. So far completely successful.

Pulling into the parking lot, Buddy gave the scene outside what seemed like a casual glance.

Hardly. Beneath my hand Buddy’s muscles were like spring steel. The moment the door opened, Buddy was prepared to spring.

I tightened my grip on the leash as the door came open. Buddy oozed out like a python, dragging me behind.

It looked normal to a casual observer. It was really a struggle for dominance. Buddy had the leash pulled guitar-string tight. Where he would go, neither he nor I knew. But go was the plan.

His go plan didn’t include any move toward the front door.

Tugging and coaxing wasn’t working well.

So I picked him up and carried him inside.

Shouldering my way into the gray-tiled lobby, I noticed that two of the seats in the waiting area were occupied by cats.

My dog, the immortal Winston, would have clawed his way free of my grasp and launched himself onto the kitties.

Winston’s cat interest, rivaled only by his fascination with squirrels, makes each walk an adventure. See a cat … go toward the cat at full speed. Fortunately, we’ve always managed to stop him before reaching these cats.

What would Buddy’s reaction be? I put him onto the floor. He crouched warily.

Turning his body and swiveling his head brought him face to face with one of the cats:
A gray domestic shorthair, dark stripes and utterly uninterested in this dog. He glanced at Buddy. Although glance seems a little overstated … Buddy happened to pass through his field of vision.

Buddy stopped and stared. And nothing. No reaction. By the time he had meandered around to the second cat, a yellow tabby, he seemed bored.

So seemed the rest of the visit. It was one of those good vet visits. The dog is healthy, his teeth are gleaming white, no mites or worms, big joints are solid. A good checkup.

After that, having to carry him back to the car was a let down, knocking an “A” grade visit down to a not-as-good “B+.”
After all that good news, Buddy should have strutted manfully (dogfully?) back to the car, barked imperiously and leapt gracefully inside. Dignified.

But no, this squirming 61.2 pound dog wriggled like a big baby and I had to push mightily on his butt to get him inside the car.

Of course the upshot was that he’s healthy. And he didn’t puke in my dad’s car.