One of the problems with caring for a non-greedy poorly dog…

is ensuring they eat enough. Because Petal’s kidney’s aren’t working properly, the vet wants to avoid giving her any unnecessary pills to help her anemia, relying instead on food. However, because Petal isn’t a greedy dog it’s quite difficult to ensure she eats enough. She self regulates her food and eats when she is hungry, and because she is feeling poorly, she’s not feeling very hungry. Also, I think that crunchy food, or food she has to chew, is painful for her because of the inflammation around her eyes, however she doesn’t seem to like liver, either raw or cooked, even when it was chopped up like particularly gruesome baby food. She does seem to like frankfurter sausages, which she seems to swallow lumps of without chewing, and chicken. We bought her some non-cheap tinned dog food (it’s actually quite difficult to find good quality dog food outside of the big supermarkets) which she also ate, but I had to chop it up for her.

So we’re having to entice her to eat. She’s actually eating very well, particularly by Petal standards. I wish she’d have eaten the liver as this has more iron (certainly more iron than the frankfurters which are, I believe, mainly sawdust). However we’re hoping that any food will give her energy and the more energy she has the more appetite she may also have.

Petal’s not quite as bad as Henry, who was completely non-plussed about food. Whereas we could have trained Bob to do handstands if he thought there was a mere crumb of a dog biscuit at the end of it, Henry was very unimpressed. He would come and sniff the food, lick it half heartedly and if he wasn’t hungry, he’d just walk away.

I think I would describe Bob as being optimistic about food. He could spend days looking at the fridge if he thought that a cat biscuit had fallen behind it, and as we know, he also once climbed onto the fridge looking  for the cat food. Although he had never been fed in the morning, it didn’t stop him faithfully following the big dogs to the garage gate every morning in case we suddenly remembered that he was supposed to have breakfast after all. He would stare intently at the food on the table, willing it to fall on the floor. This was exacerbated by the fact that once a gust of wind blue a bag of crisps off the table when he was giving them his Bob-stare, and from then on he was convinced of his super powers.

Petal seems brighter, her eye isn’t closed now, which it was. She had seemed quite sad when  she was on the patio earlier this week, however I wonder if that was where the bright sunlight was hard on her swollen eyes. But only time will tell…

Rain is forecast for tomorrow and for the start of next week – and this is the first rain we’ve had in months. I don’t think it’s rained since we’ve had Bobbins, perhaps no rain since June? I had a quick look to see if I could see anything about it being a dry summer, but I just saw on a weather site that it said that it was a dryer than normal summer in the Badajoz region, but didn’t qualify this by saying what normal was. Still, wonder how long it will be before we’re moaning about the rain!