People, Pets Talk Things Over
Every morning my wife, Teresa, rousts our daughter, Mikkel, out of bed at 6 to get ready for school. She also wakes up the hairy princess, Scooter, our fox terrier, who’s still woozy despite having slept 20 of the last 24 hours.
Scooter does the obligatory, exaggerated dog yawn/stretch combo and a violent shake to clear the cobwebs out of her skull and follows my wife downstairs — and waits outside the pantry door. Impatiently.
It doesn’t matter if Scooter’s bladder is bursting, if she sees her dreaded enemy the chipmunks on the deck outside the patio door, she starts the day with a snack-attack!
Like caffeine does for Teresa and me with our first cup of joe, the treats somehow jolt Scooter’s consciousness and jump-start her hectic schedule of eating, napping, chasing the chipmunks she never catches, napping.
Teresa goes into the pantry and stares at several boxes and sacks of dog treats and starts a dialogue with Scooter that is hovering at an IQ level of about 50.
In an animated discussion, TOGETHER, they come up with the perfect menu choice for the day. Simultaneously with Teresa visually combing the shelves, Scooter is as impatient as any other 8-year-old at Disneyland and shows her short fuse by clawing Teresa’s legs like a cat at a scratching post.
Then Teresa gets that nauseating baby talk going when she says something like, “You want your treat, Scootie? Here it coooomes from mama!”
And she proceeds to drop the treat into Scooter’s mouth, which, if you know the length of a fox terrier’s snout, makes this feeding frenzy resemble showtime at Gatorland in Florida.
Last year I went to an elderly gentleman’s house on an unexpected Meals-On-Wheels run and found a cat so fat she resembled a hippo with fur.
The cat was staring at a kitchen cabinet that must have held every cat treat they carry at both PetsMart and PetCo. I asked the gentleman, who was crazy for the cat, “How in the world do you know which treat to give your cat?”
“Simple,” he said. “We talk it over and she tells me which one she wants.”
Twenty-year veterinary veteran aside, I understood only too well.