Picky eater

My dog, Cindy Jae, has never been a good eater. When she first came, she would gobble her food as fast as possible without choking.

Who am I kidding? I think she did choke herself once or twice.

A large piece of concrete fixed that problem. And no, I didn't throw it at her. I put it in her bowl so she had to eat around it which slowed her down.

We switched from the expensive food that the kennel sent home with her to an expensive food that I could buy in bulk at the local warehouse store. At first she was fine with it, but she gradually became less interested in eating anything but socks and game controllers. There were a few times she would eat the whole bowl full of Smart Puppy Large Breed, but they were rare.

Recently it had gotten worse. She wasn't eating much and when she doesn't eat, she doesn't drink much either. No wonder she's smaller than her siblings. I even started trying psychoanalysis. Maybe she's anorexic. Maybe food is the one area she has control. Maybe she's eating socks because she wants to feel full.

"Psycho" is right.

Yesterday was the worst she's been. She didn't "busy" most of the day and she hadn't eaten much in a few days. She's been very confined lately (trying desperately to break the whole sock-eating thing), so I couldn't think of anything she might have eaten that she shouldn't. I remembered that when we kept another little puppy for a week, they kept trying to eat each other's food (they're on different types) *and* Cindy Jae is also almost a year old and that's when we switch them to an adult food anyway.

So last night I picked up a small bag of Beneful. It's brightly colored and smelly and I was hoping it would tempt that stubborn dog to EAT. I mixed some of that in with her regular food and stood back. That dog LOVED it. She polished off almost the whole bowl, but she did a pretty good job of eating just the new food and leaving some of the old type. This morning, she followed closely behind as I filled her bowl and even patiently let me put her eye drops in (she's got some kind of conjunctivitis) knowing that her bowl was coming. She normally hates the eye drops! When I let her out after a short stay in her crate this afternoon, she raced to the spot where her bowls are kept and turned away dejected that it wasn't dinnertime yet.

So maybe her problem all along was just that she hated the puppy food.