We’ve never had a fat dog before. Although Bob would dearly love to have been fat, his downfall was that when he wasn’t eating or dreaming about eating, he was undertaking his next food finding session, which entailed rather more exercise than he would have voluntarily undertaken. It was Bob, remember, that Ian found on top of our very tall fridge, trying to get to the cat food. His constant trips to the cat tree to see if the cats had dropped a crumb or two of cat food, or wandering around the kitchen looking for tasty dropped morsels, kept him, while not trim, not on the podgy side of plump.
Dumpling is probably the most slothful dog we’ve ever had, because she lacks Bob’s optimism that if she wanders round long enough she may find some food. Instead, she gets up, wanders in to the living room, has a nap, followed by a siesta, followed by an afternoon nap before going out for tea. She does jump around at tea-time, but not enough to count as exercise. Millie gets a wealth of exercise from her running around the table at meal times, goodness knows how far she goes, but she gets speed up and I don’t think we’ll ever need to worry about her not getting enough exercise. Bobbins does well too, although not as speedy as Milly, she does spend a lot of time trotting around and is in good shape. But Dumpling prefers to sleep.
So today we took her for a walk. We knew it would be difficult as Dumpling, being blind and only knowing the house and patio, would find the big outdoors scary. We decided to both take her out so one could hold the lead and the other could call her. It wasn’t a great success, but she did walk a little bit and have a sniff. She was carried for quite a bit though, which I think may have given her the wrong impression of ‘walk’, but we’ll just have to keep on with her for a while until she gets used to it. We’ll try her wearing a harness tomorrow rather than a collar which kept slipping over her head.