Do not blame the dog
Think smaller. Your silhouette is your identity in our new well-fed world. Tonight the dog and I went for the annual checkup – the one where the vet examines the animal and then blames the owner for everything. Well, not everything, because I didn’t growl with menace every time the white coated human approached the white coated canine. But in a world where big is not better, my dog now has some lifestyle changes on the calendar.
A precise calendar, at that. You see, during the last year, her dogginess gained 17% in measured mass. Every treat, every overfull bowl, every pat on the head seems to have gone straight to the hips (haunch, whatever). Where we saw a warm cuddly companion, the vet saw deteriorating joints, stress on the circulatory system, a reason to change the way things are.
Now, it’s my cynical side that thinks “There might be a link beside the huge waiting room filled with expensive designer dogfood and this need to see my friend lose weight”. There is a paid food salesman inside the local vet mentality. One that believes a bag of dogfood is measured by how many coins are needed to weight/pay the bill. I’m sure that when we return for the “evaluation” in six weeks, the efforts to firm up the dog will not have been sufficient.
There was no suggestion of a target weight, so beauty will be in the eye of the beholder seller of food. My own reaction: the dog is happy, I’m happy, so if we miss the visit, who is going to know the difference?
