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On June 13, 2013

The fleeting taste of food she scarfed down too quickly

This was quite some time back when the dog was really finicky with her food.

For the first 4-6 weeks when we brought her home, she literally picked at her food. Treats she took with gusto but her regular meals she ate with great reluctance. And this behaviour was for canned food that she apparently love at the shelter! But no, not here at home and on top of nibbling reluctantly, she was picking out all the kibble mixed in there and throwing them on the floor outside the bowl. It was frustrating and worrying in equal parts for first time dog owners like us. We took the dog from the shelter and obviously it was not so that she could starve herself!

To some extent her picky-ness worked to her favour, the shelter gave us a can of Addiction wet food to test out on her and she gobbled it up. Addiction was more expensive, but we were fine to add it to the menu since it was one of the well rated brands and she liked it. The subsequent pack of Solid Gold chicken kibble fared just as badly against her original complimentary Pro Plan salmon kibble.

But we did want to keep to a certain monthly food budget, since we were on one person’s income and finances is always a big concern for me. So no, she’s just got to make do with a rotation of different variety of foods at different price points. We rotated the Addiction wet food with another cheaper supermarket brand Nature’s Gift. On label, the Nature’s Gift ingredients list looked OK, but the AAFCO standards were not applied to it. That said, Donna has been eating it her whole life at the shelter, so it is food that her body is used to. So we kept to it, rather than change her diet cold turkey. Meanwhile, we continue to buy different kibble brands to find something that she will actually like. Plain Canidae, Wellness and TOTW kibble did not fare well with her either.

Somewhere along the line, we instituted the timing rule. It went something like we will remove the food in half hour even if she did not finish it. Not much observable effect there.

She was, as the vet pointed out, overweight anyway, so we decided not to over-worry if she missed a meal or two when she refused to eat. Yes, we determined that she could not just erm… *cough* blackmail *cough* us into giving her expensive food all the time by refusing to eat what we felt was affordable for us.

But yes, eventually she grew hungry enough that she decided the canned food and kibble was not beneath her. She started to eat more of her food. However, her annoying habit of running in and out of the kitchen during mealtimes did not change. She just wasn’t interested in the food and quite frankly preferred the fun of running in and out to take a bite here and there when she pleased. And so of course, she didn’t finish the food as you can see in this video, where there is a fleeting glance of her.

I was waiting to catch her on video running in and out, planned to send it to Florence at the shelter, ho-ho-ho. But as you can see, she decided she didn’t want any more food.

What changed things was really the installation of the child gate at the entrance of the kitchen. Suddenly it clicked in the dog’s mind that once the child gate closes behind her, the food will be gone! Oh the horror. The effect was pretty instantaneous after the light bulb went off. Now Donna refuses to leave the kitchen until she has licked clean every scrap of food, and then she continues to clean the already empty bowl.

But she still refused plain kibble unless it was flavoured with canned food topping.

However, towards the end of May, she actually accepted a Fromm dog pork kibble that I offered to her. Usually I opened a new pack of some kibble and offer a piece to her to see if she liked it. The usual reaction will be sniff, snort and point her high and mighty nose in the air in refusal. I was pleasantly surprised. The only difference in the way I offered the Fromm kibble is that I had mixed the kibble with her canned food for several meals already before I offered the plain piece of kibble to her. Either that made a difference or the Fromm kibble was too yummy.

We bought a new pack of kibble yesterday, this time it is Acana chicken with burbank potato. By now, the dog has somehow conditioned me to think that perhaps she just has a cautiousness to anything new that I offer to her. (After all I am the person who inflict new torments on her every other day like nail cutting and soon teeth brushing! Hahaha!) Anyway, I thought I should mix it in for her breakfast before attempting to offer her a plain piece of kibble to see her reaction. She took that kibble as well.

I have to say “HALLELUIAH” at this point because finally I can give her kibble instead of treats as training reward! Can you believe her weight kept climbing through the months despite us feeding less than the recommended portions on the food packages??? Mr P accuses me of giving her too many treats. But how else do you positively reinforce a dog?

Ending this post with a picture of the dog thinking about food in front of the kitchen. She does that a lot. Make us look like villains who don’t feed her enough.

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

A dog’s job is to eat, sleep and play everyday…. Everyday.

By weliveinaflat

On June 9, 2013

In Behaviour

Why so happy?

Because we get to play fetch…

And then we play tug…

All with a simple $2 rope toy from Daiso. Cheap thrill, yah!

And yes, we play the same thing everyday and she looks like this. : )

I used to be apprehensive playing tug with the rope toy. She can be rather rough with her toys as you can see in this video.

But turns out Donna is quite good with the soft mouth thing… and no, not trained by us. Someone in the shelter must have done a good job playing with her. :P She did play bite me before, but she just had some part of my hand in her mouth without actually biting it.

Anyway, it took me quite a while to get the hang of taking pictures while playing with her, phew. I used Gorillacam and later switched to Camera+. The shots of her running down the corridor turn out clearer with Gorillacam though. Whoever would have thought that we would end up taking so many pictures using the corridor as a runway. The downlights here can make lighting a challenge though, depending on where the dog was relative to the downlight.

Pointless, repetitious Donna breaks fast pics

By weliveinaflat

On June 8, 2013

In Behaviour

So the dog had a misadventure with some dried floral arrangement in the living room that she was not supposed to sample.

The stomach of a dog often knows when something bad is inside it, and dogs are designed with a defense mechanism where they throw up repeatedly until the stomach is FOR SURE empty. So if Fido eats some yuck from the back yard, he’ll vomit 15 times over 3-4 hours until only white foam or little puddles of yellow bile are coming up, then he’ll gack a few more times, empty, just to make for SURE sure all the bad stuff is gone. – leospetcare.com

We fasted the dog overnight, so that we don’t overburden her poor little tummy on top of the GI upset (oh my, fancy schmancy vet acronym! :P). She stared at us eating dinner, poked her nose up from under the table, decided it was hopeless and then flopped on the floor to chew on her bones.

Yup, so she was more than ready to break her fast yesterday morning. And because I actually made the effort to boil chicken early in the morning. Tada!~ This deserves a post of its own. (I don’t even boil chicken for myself when I am sick… – -)

Please get out of my kitchen, of course!

Boiled chicken with barley is temporary bland patient food which she obviously finds delish. You would think barley is bland. I expected her to finish the chicken but leave much of the barley behind. She slurped it all up. I had the already cooked barley boiling in there with the chicken to soften it up some more so maybe it soaked up some of the chicken taste. Perhaps.

I try to boil barley every weekend. It’s an old belief that barley water is “cooling” and good for you when you are feeling “heaty“. The left over barley ends up in the dog and my tummy. It’s real filling and has many health benefits including helping to control one’s blood sugar level, reduce blood pressure and cholesterol and promote digestive tract health.

For dogs, any benefits it seems is more debatable since dogs don’t need grain. But it did not do the dog any observable harm so I add a bit of it into her regular kibble and canned food mixture now and then.

Anyway, there was no further vomiting episode after breakfast. Dinner was more of the same, except that I threw in some canned tuna in water too. And then it will be back to the regular processed food diet tomorrow so that Donna gets all the necessary nutrients that my amateur cooking and diet planning skills cannot achieve! :P

In which the dog amuses herself…

By weliveinaflat

On May 30, 2013

In Behaviour

What do you mean you’d rather sit there and drink coffee?

Well then, I SHALL amuse myself!

… amuse myself…amuse myself…amuse myself…amuse myself……amuse myself…

… there… I’m AMUSED.

It took me a while to clue into what she was doing sticking her nose into her toy bin, so the pictures started mid-way of her spreading her toys on the floor.

We didn’t measure when we bought the bin. So when we got home and compared, we worried that the bin was perhaps too high for her to comfortably get at her toys in the bin. Obviously a groundless worry.

She probably wanted to share her toys and play with me, except that I really needed to have my breakfast caffeine yesterday morning before I do anything else, heh~ :P Don’t worry, she got her fun after that :P

By the way, I discovered snoopygrams today.

Give yourselves a pat on the back people! :D

Kibble hunting in the flat

By weliveinaflat

On May 29, 2013

In Behaviour

Donna does not like kibble. She doesn’t. Period.

To demonstrate, I thought I will take pictures of my left hand offering kibble to her and she will show a disgusted face, sort of like this one when she refused to touch the toy car the other day.

See that’s what she does, sniff… telepathically send the “you want me to eat that??? Ur-g-hh” message as she pointedly looks away.

So here goes my left hand with the kibble… and of course she is going to sniff and raise her eyebrow at me…

… wait…”Crunch crunch”… wait a second… did she just eat the kibble?

She just ate the kibble! *I refused to take a picture of my stunned face.*

In the last couple of months, we’ve bought Canidae Grain-free Pure Sky, TOTW Pacific Stream and Wellness Core Reduced Fat Formula kibble for her. All of which she looked at with snorts of disdain. And just now she took a Fromm Dog Pork and Applesauce kibble without batting an eyelid! Are you joking me?

So I thought let’s test again.

… stupid dog ate the kibble.

I suppose I should be happy we finally found kibble that she actually liked enough to eat on its own without us having to top it with wet food, milk, yoghurt or tuna etc, etc.

So now you just have to be satisfied with not seeing her highness’ icy disdain which I had originally planned as a prelude to telling you the other silly game we play to get her to eat kibble on her own = =!

Sigh. Foiled by my dog.

Anyway back to the story of making it fun for Donna to eat kibble. I wrote this a month ago when Donna was still refusing to eat kibble, probably should have published it sooner, rather than later. (This is so not enjoyable, since there doesn’t seem to be a point to it now, is there?)

So anyway, about a month or more ago we started playing the kibble hunting game with Donna. It started because after a walk, Donna appeared too tired or lazy to want to get her food out of her Kong Genius Leo by herself. Or sometimes it rained too heavily in the morning and we opted to go for a quick loo break rather than a morning walk. We needed to find some way to run off that excess energy so that she does not get bored and then destructive if we had to leave her alone at home.

We already knew that Donna gets excited chasing after the kibble that fall out of her Kong Genius Leo. So on those mornings when she was too lazy to jump around with her Kong, I sat in the middle of the living room with a ration of her kibble and threw it one by one and she ran after them. It totally worked. It was quite amazing actually, I could understand chasing after food that you like, but chasing after food that you don’t? I can’t explain it but it worked with her. So good!

You decide how far, how fast and the direction you throw the kibble. And that determined the distance and speed the dog covers during this short exercise. Generally, start slow and build up. After the 5th kibble, Donna typically starts running up to the kibble and crunching it. Yes, the dog did not eat kibble then. She did not seem to use her sense of smell as much as her ears to hear the kibble skipping across the tiles and her eyes to see where the kibble lands before running to lap it up. The more praise and the faster the kibble gets thrown, the more excited she gets, bounding to the left and right after kibble, her tail waving in the air.

But I am careful not to get her too excited because she chases the next kibble even when she hasn’t finished crunching the previous kibble and that could possibly lead to her choking on half-crunched kibble bits while bounding around in excitement.

After a while, she would slow down, possibly panting as she walked calmly to the thrown kibble. That will be my cue for dumping the remaining kibble into her bowl topped up with a scoop of wet food so she would finish it.

Simple game, totally FREE, and gets her up on her feet and having fun. Not bad for breakfast interaction with the dog before we needed to get out of the house.

The downside? You find some gritty kibble crumbs underfoot but nothing sweeping the floor can’t solve.

Can my dog’s brown eyes turn green?

By weliveinaflat

On May 23, 2013

In Behaviour

People with multiple dogs in the household may have experienced doggy jealousy.

Yes! Dogs do get jealous according to this 2008 Time article that references a Dec. 10 study published in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When a pair of dogs were asked to perform an action but only one dog was rewarded, the unrewarded dog could possibly feel emotion that screams “Not Fair”.

To reveal Fido’s green-eyed monster, Range and three other scientists at the University of Vienna put together pairs of domestic dogs, each accompanied by an experimenter. Both dogs in each pair were given commands to place their paws in the experimenter’s hands, and when they obeyed, they were given a reward — a piece of bread or sausage. But when one dog wasn’t given a reward for obeying, and the other dog in the room was, the unrewarded dog would refuse to respond to the repeated commands. The scientists measured the dogs’ responses by how many times they had to prompt the unrewarded dog before it obeyed.

The dogs’ reactions to the unfair distribution of rewards is called “inequity aversion” — when an animal acts to stop perceived inequalities within its social group — and it’s a defining characteristic of social, or cooperative, species. “They wanted the same reward for the same work,” says Paul Morris, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Portsmouth who specializes in animal behavior. Morris is quick to explain that the study’s results aren’t anthropomorphic: “I’m not saying that dog jealousy is precisely like human jealousy.” Instead, he says, the dogs likely experienced a primitive form of envy. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1865847,00.html#ixzz2U82fJyQZ

We are not a multiple dog household. (In fact, the Housing Development Board (HDB) rules does not allow more than one dog per household.) But sometimes, I wonder if our dog gets jealous, for example when I feel too hungry and decide to feed myself first before I feed her. Does she think “not fair”? I do know that she does come right up to the table and produce lots of sniff, sniff, sniff, sniffing before she snorts her disgust at my ignoring her and concentrating on my food. Then she turns and plonks herself on the floor, her back facing me almost as if she was mortally insulted. (Ok, that’s probably me attributing imaginary emotions to her :P)

Anyway, here’s a green water lily pond since I can’t show you Donna’s eyes turning green. Not just yet.

Note: Dogs’ eye can flash green in the dark when they reflect light.

Not so much bitter-sweet, more frustration I think…

By weliveinaflat

On May 22, 2013

In Behaviour

Donna has a new toy. It was a gift she won at the Subaru booth at the Nat Geo Adopt a Free Dog event. I said gift, rather than prize because she didn’t really win it. She had to sit on the challenge mat for a full minute and she couldn’t stay that long! Not with all the excitement going on about her. But the judge told us to collect at the prize table anyway. So yes, I would say it was a gift. Haha. Donna doesn’t know to feel bitter sweet about it. :P

A toy is a toy and the toy is mine! Anything soft is to be chewed, even pull-string mechanized toy cars that move!

Now if only my black rat of a dog will make cookie monster noises when she does that!

What do you mean “leave it”?

Stop telling me to “take it” and “leave it”. I don’t want it anymore! There!

Are you happy now? *probably muttering to oneself… if a dog can mutter, that is.*

Yup, I have a talent for frustrating the dog. :D

To a dog, hands are for play

By weliveinaflat

On May 20, 2013

In Behaviour

Loves to tug…

… violently.

Loves to fetch…

… but doesn’t always bring it back.

Loves a tummy rub…

… she loves you back.

No, Donna doesn’t wanna come

By weliveinaflat

On May 18, 2013

In Behaviour

Much as we love our dog… she can sometimes have her four feet planted too firmly on the ground. Particularly when she smells tuna in the kitchen. But my dear, I can be stubborn too. The tuna went into the fridge to be dished out the next day instead.

Dogs in the city need to be adaptable and independent, especially if they are re-homed with families with working adults. We’re slowly working with Donna to get used to be alone in preparation for the day I find a job. Our dog survived 8 hours alone at home yesterday. That is the longest yet, with no accidents! We’re so proud of her.