Sense of Adventure

I try to keep Emma Dog supplied with rawhide bones. She tends to get bored - I’m just not real exciting company for a dog, our walks (still not regular enough!) notwithstanding. The bones keep her entertained for hours.

The other night her Uncle Joe noted she had what he thought of as “small” rawhide bones, and suggested bigger ones would last longer, hence be more cost effective. I buy them in bags at the best discount I can get, usually when they fall off the truck and wind up on the shelf at Costco. They carried some from a brand called Healthy Hides a couple years ago that just lasted forever.

Perhaps that’s why they don’t carry them any more.

It usually takes Em a few days to chonk through one of the bones I’ve been giving her. But I thought, Hey, maybe Joe’s got a point. He is the wisest man I know, after all.

So yesterday I went to PetSmart to get her a bag o’ food, and checked the rawhide bones. And my eye lit upon the Super Colossal Dinosaur Shinbone model. Aha! I thought. That’ll hold her.

So I got it, and bestowed it on her late last night. She accepted it eagerly. Then she dropped it on the living room floor and peered at it.

“Chew your bone, sweetie,” I said.

She looked up at me like, “Dad? How?”

How, indeed.

The thing’s two feet long and has knots at the ends the size of my fists. It’s actually as long as her head and torso together - she’s a big dog, but it’s mostly in the breadth of her shoulders and chest; she’s basically a bag of cement with legs. I was deceived by the fact that she’s got a very large head (not disproportionate. But, dang, it’s big) and very powerful jaws. It also turns out she doesn’t have a very large mouth.

The girl tried. She couldn’t seem to fit her jaws around the knots and seemed unable to find a purchase on the haft. I tried encouraging her, telling her how we all had faith in her. How her beloved Uncle Joe had faith in her. Then I decided, ixnay on at-thay; if I got too enthusiastic repeating Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe, all the pets would get the impression he was about to arrive, and get all excited, and consequently get severely miffed at me when I failed actually to produce him in the middle of the night. Eventually she sighed and lay down on it.

Today after I got up she tried again - chewing her bones seems a social activity for her; she usually won’t do it unless I’m sitting with her at a minimum. Usually TJ and Squeak come to hang out too, and turns into family time for the Milán Pack. And she really loves chewing her bone when Uncle Joe visits.

Anyway, despite trying dogfully, Emma made no better headway today than she did last night. I tried packing some wet cat food spurned by TJ into some small holes in the middle of it, that seemed to offer a possible purchase for her teeth. She licked it out as best she could but again seemed frustrated by her inability to get a good chew.

So I decided drastic measures were required. I didn’t want her to get so frustrated that she would simply refuse to acknowledge the thing’s existence, as dogs will do - the damned thing cost me eleven bucks. So out on the front porch it went with me and a hacksaw, and in it came in a couple of minutes in two neat pieces.

All better. The cut end of the shaft let her get right to grips.

However, she also took it down like a lathe. She’ll probably slow down some when she hits the knots; I hope I don’t have to try to saw those in half so she can fit her jaws around ‘em. As of now, though, it’s looking as if the Big Bone strategy might prove no more cost-effective than giving her the smaller ones.

We shall see. Worth a try, though.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Emma!, Life, Shameless Pandering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.