No, Sugar's Not Dead, Just Been to Wisconsin

Actually, Sugar didn't take a trip to Wisconsin at all. Only in her mind. She decided to go on strike for her legitimate rights as a canine and symbolically fled to an Illinois Motel 6 to demand better pay, er, food. She already gets the best, mind you: only organic chicken and lamb, nice and moist from the can, with a little kibble to keep her teeth healthy. But no. She believes herself entitled, as a purebred Poodle, to something yet better. There are PEOPLE who would eat the food she's been served (if they hadn't seen the can, naturally), but Sugar has trained her government (that would be me) to give her only what we ourselves will eat.

So now I cook for three. I know it seems ridiculous, but trust me, she refuses to eat dog food, and for a couple of weeks (our "motel in Illinois" weeks) we slugged it out. I put organic dog food and kibble in her bowl, she looked at it, sniffed, and trotted off. I tried spoon feeding it to her, even letting her lick it off my fingers. Still no dice. I tested out real turkey chunks with kernels of rice and a bit of kibble thrown in for texture, and she gobbled up the turkey, the rice, and left every last microscopic morsel of kibble in the pink bowl.

How does she know what's dog food and what isn't? Is it seasoning? The cans say there's seasoning in them. But Sugar doesn't trust anything that didn't once sit on our dinner plates, that wasn't cooked in a copper-bottomed pan. So who am I to fight that kind of persistence, that kind of innate culinary perception in one whose only crime is not to be human? I've given up the struggle. Sugar wins again. Now, a meal that used to sit on the mat for an hour is snaffled up in 1.5 seconds. That does warm me a little. After all, who isn't flattered when one's cooking is appreciated, even adored. After a meal now she licks her chops several times and gazes at me in perfect contentment. Well, damn her teeth, I say. She'll have to get used to a puppy tooth brush, and too bad.

So I have to say it's one for Sugar in New Jersey, zero so far for the politicians in Wisconsin. Maybe I ought to hire Sugar out to teach them how to make their demands more palatable to the public. She certainly has a will and a winning way.

Now on to agility training and learning to be a therapy dog (though she's a little selfish, perhaps, for that work, but we'll see).