Bone Wars

If you have a dog, you know this already:

rawhide = crack

My Boys love them some rawhide. Kirby has a bizarre ritual he likes to perform with his. We couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing until Tiki came to live here. Once we saw Tiki successfully bury a rawhide in the yard, we realized that Kirby had been trying to bury his in the floor in his usual incompetent way.

Bunny to the old man: "I think Kirby may be retarded."

The old man to Bunny: "What do you mean, 'you think?'"

The introduction of the Yarn Bandit into the household has changed the whole rawhide thing. It used to be that Kirby would just carry his around the house in his mouth and he pranced around all "look what I got!" and he'd chew it and then just leave it when he got tired and come back to it later. No can do any more. Tiki would steal it. So now what happens is Tiki immediately take his and hides it somewhere. Kirby prances for a while, then he chews it and tries to finish it before Tiki can take it, with Tiki staring him down at close range the whole time. Poor Kirbs. Sometimes I can tell he's getting tired but doesn't dare stop because he doesn't understand that there will always be another rawhide. When I can see that we've gotten to that point, I take it from him. He pouts, but soon he forgets about it, and I give it back later when he's had some rest.

If The Man tries to take Kirby's rawhide, Kirby growls. GROWLS! and sometimes BARKS!

So here is Kirby trying unsuccessfully to bury his rawhide in a dog bed:

Look at those hind legs all tensed up for leverage!

Here he is trying to poke it down with his nose.

That didn't work too well, so he tried to use his nose to scrape some "dirt" over it.

That didn't work either. Unfortunately, the dog bed is all one piece.

Plan B: Let's dig a hole!

Hmmm. no.

Plan C: I'm high! I'm high on dog crack! I'm going to tear around the house! The aftermath of that is here:

He has relocated Tiki's wubbie from the bedroom to the living room.

Tiki, on the other hand, knows that if you're going to hide something, you need to put it under something else. He likes to put his down between the sofa cushions, but here he is putting it under the crate pad:

I have to, I mean get to, look at his butthole all day, so I don't know why you should be spared.

Just so you know, it's not that Kirby can't hide things. He hid his chew toy in the crate, as you can see here, along with more Tiki hiding the rawhide:

Not great, but not so bad, either. He's just not very good at it. And sometimes he forgets how.

Retarded or not, he's perfect exactly the way he is.

Good Stuff in the Mail today

Yarn and Dexter, Season 2.

Plus, here's the Yarn Bandit shaking his ears. He shredded a paperback book yesterday. Now it has no cover and the index only goes up to "P." Lucky for him he's so goddamned cute.

Dirtbunny's Yew Bush

So in our living room, we have a big bow window. And outside in front of the window is a huge, overgrown yew bush. Last year, during the 1.8 billion dollar landscape expenditure, they chopped off the top half of the bush, promising me ever so faithfully that it would come back. It's pretty funny looking. From the outside, it looks like a yew bush. But from inside the house, it looks like a yew bush that has been scooped out--a nice green shell on the outside, but nuthin but twigs on top and on the inside. It is starting to come back, slowly, and in the mean time, we can see all the critters who like to hang out in the bushes, like this guy:

That is a chipmunk butt. Is it Chip?

I think it might be Dale. It's hard to tell, especially if you are looking at bad photos.

Yep, that's Dale (like I would know). He can't possibly be oblivious to the presence of dogs here, so I can only conclude that he doesn't see The Boys as much of a threat. It's nice to see him carousing around all bold and tough. He's probably right about the threat level. I have a feeling that if my boys were any good at hunting critters, they wouldn't have ended up as rescue dogs, and so much the better for us all. The fact that he runs around leaving a trail gives The Boys some good stuff to sniff when they go outside (and they love that bush).

Yarn Bandit Steals Treats from Dirtbunny

Let us begin with some important background facts before we get into our story.

1. Tiki is a ho.


2. He is especially a ho when it comes to food.


3. Bunny sometimes has a bedtime snack.


4. If Bunny has a bedtime snack, it frequently is chocolate.


5. Chocolate is bad for dogs.


6. A little bit of chocolate is not a problem for dogs.


7. A lot of chocolate is fatal to dogs.


8. In between "so what?" and "OMG I killed my dog" is a spectrum of various degrees of illness that can include vomiting, diarrhea, panting, hyperness, and cardiac-type symptoms that one would associate with being hyped up on uppers. Hyped up on uppers? That doesn't sound right. Forgive me if I'm not up on the most current drug slang.


9. At what point the amount of chocolate becomes enough to make your dog sick or kill him depends on the size of your dog, the amount of chocolate consumed, the nature of the chocolate itself, particularly the concentration of cocoa (milk chocolate being pretty tame-which you chocolate lovers already knew--and unsweetened chocolate being at the top of the list), and who knows what idiosyncratic characteristics of your dog.


10. Because of #9, it is very difficult to determine exactly where the lines between sick/well and live/die are, no matter how much time you spend googling it. (Ask me how I know.)
    
11. Did you know that the key chemical component of chocolate that is bad for dogs (I forget what it is, but it isn't the caffeine) has a half-life of 17.5 hours?

And so one night last week, Dirtbunny makes herself a leetle bedtime snack. She pours herself a glass of milk. She gets out a small bowl. In the bowl she puts four Hershey's kisses, a brownie with hazelnuts, and a few squares of G&B 70%. (For reasons which will soon become clear, if you haven't figured it out already, Bunny spent a lot of time trying to remember exactly how many squares of G&B 70% she put in that bowl. Maybe 6. Probably 4. No more than an ounce, cuz the whole bar is 4 oz and it was way less than a bar. As for the brownie, the whole batch had 4 oz. of Ghirardelli unsweetened, and this was probably about 1/16th of the batch, probably, so that's a quarter ounce. And how many kisses exactly? Are you sure it was four? What if it was five? How much do five kisses weigh? Wait a minute! Are hazelnuts the nuts that are bad for dogs or was it macadamia nuts? Gaaaaaaah!) Bunny carried her bowl of chocolate and her glass of milk to her room.

Oops! Still have to go. Don't wanna take my snack in there with me. (Pretty much all of us have fetishes about taking food into the bathroom, right? It's not just me, right?) Gotta put it down somewhere. I intend to eat it in bed, but I don't wanna put it down on the night table because Yarn Bandit has a proven ability to get at things left on the night table.

So I put it across the room on a tall table with nothing adjacent to it that can be used for climbing, and, importantly, no known past security breaches. And my snack is safe, and I go have some alone time, the details of which I will not mention. I will, say, however, that while I was having my alone time, I heard some chomping, slurping noises, but I assumed that was our resident paw-licker, the Baron von Kirbenstein, because that's what he does every night.

You have already guessed what happened next.

Somehow, and don't ask me how because I've been mulling this over for a long time and haven't figured it out, the bowl of treats is no longer on the table where I left it. It is face-up, in the dog bed. It is nearly empty, but not entirely. The tiny little hoser has eaten the brownie and the kisses and some of the 70%, but he has left three squares of the 70% behind. I don't know if he hated it (remember, he eats his own barf with gusto, so that doesn't seem likely) or just didn't have time to finish it before he got busted.

The Man is consulted. We decide that we are not going to go to the Emergency Vet because we know that a little chocolate is no big deal and because Dirtbunny thinks she remembers reading somewhere that a 50-75 pound dog ate a two-pound bag of M&Ms and just got sick but didn't die and we did a little quick and dirty math and calculated (Ha! as if it was that scientific) that he might get sick but probably, probably, wouldn't die. He'll barf a little, we said. Maybe he'll get the poops, we said. It'll be OK.

The Man was confident about this, but Bunny is a hypochondriac and Could. Not. Let. It. Go. We went to work the next day, where Bunny proceeded to spend a lot of time, and (don't tell her boss) I mean a lot of time, on the Interweb trying to determine whether she had killed her dog by negligently, or maybe with reckless disregard, giving him access to chocolate. Or maybe it was knowingly. She knows he's a ho and a thief. She knows chocolate is bad for dogs. Oh Boy. Jack McCoy is going to get her but good.

I am happy to say that, with the exception of a few hours of acting hyper and obnoxious (which earned him some crate time), our little sun worshipper was fine. No barfing or pooping, nothing scary, just a little bit wound up for a little while. Scared the crap out of Dirtbunny, though. She is relieved that she is not going down on felony dog-abuse charges, and she is relieved that Tiki is not dead. Or sick. But especially not dead.

Whew.

If worry-wort was an Olympic sport, Dirtbunny would be a serious medal contender.

Now here's an advanced-level math problem. Given what is described above about the estimated amounts and nature of chocolate consumed, a half-life of 17.5 hours, and assuming a canine weight of 26 pounds, did the Yarn Bandit eat enough chocolate to (a) get sick or (b) die and (c) how long before we know and (d) if he did get sick, how long before he's better? It's an open-book quiz, so feel free to use the full power of the Interweb in arriving at your answer.

Sure, you know the answer now, but what if you had to figure it out before you knew for certain how it ended? What if you had to second-guess your decision not to seek immediate medical attention? How confident would you be about your answer under those circumstances?

Vampire

Bunny made one of her periodic trips to the vampire last weekend. Worse than usual, the vampire had difficulty finding a vein. We tried the usual arm, then we switched to the arm with no veins so why bother cuz they never find one, and then back to the usual arm. Finally, a vein was found.

Bunny usually gets a small bruise from her encounter with the vampire, but this one was a doozy:


That's about three inches of purple goodness. As of now, it's purple and green. Yum.

When Bunny saw the doctor this week, the doctor said it was nothing to worry about, and it doesn't hurt (any more) so as long as I don't look at it, I'm fine.

I'm here. We have some pretty bad back pain, a chocolate-stealing beagle, and a lot of Olympics on the tube, so blogging will be spotty for a little while.