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Arrested Dogvelopment

By Beth | March 16, 2008

I’m putting my dog on the Six Word Diet.

He’s a Boston Terrier, and I never knew this, but Boston Terriers are born with appetites that would rival Chastity Bono’s.

I feel sorry for the little guy. It must be horrible to be hungry all day long.
When I first got him, I didn’t realize that he was incapable of feeling satiated. No matter how much food I gave him, it had no effect whatsoever.

I felt not only sorry for HIM, but frustrated at being unable to have any impact on his problem–probably the way George Bush’s speech tutor feels when they work on the word “nuclear.”

One night, when I was cleaning up the kitchen after a fried chicken and rice and gravy dinner I had made for 5 guests, I looked over and (true story!) he had crawled all the way inside the dishwasher and was hiding in the back of it, licking gravy and butter off of all the dirty plates I had just put in there.

The final blow came one morning when, AFTER I had fed him his kibble, then a few slices of hot dog, then a piece of bacon, then the end of a buttermilk biscuit, then let him lick my peanut butter spoon, then indulged him with two baby carrots and a little pile of grated cheddar, he sneaked downstairs and stood up on a shelf and pulled down the entire 40-pound dog food bag.

When I noticed that things were abnormally quiet, AND that there was an abnormal crunching sound coming from the pantry, I looked in, only to discover that he had gotten the dog food bag open and was standing entirely INSIDE OF IT, with only his back legs sticking out, sucking down kibble, hell for leather, as they say in the south.

When I dragged him out of the bag, his girth actually appeared to exceed his length, and I swear the little stinker was grinning. I’m sure that pulling off a stunt like that made him feel like Tim flippin Robbins in the (warning! spoiler!) final scene of Shawshank Redemption.

Anyway, I don’t want him to plump up for life like my now-deceased Yorkshire Terrier, who was so fat when he died that I’m sure the Rainbow Bridge collapsed when he tried to cross it.

So I thought for a while about how I could make sure my little Boston’s path to greatness would slow down, and make sure he could get trim and stay trim for life.

That’s when I got the idea of putting him on the Six Word Diet.

And, no, I don’t mean he should eat 100 calories of anything he wants, every 90 minutes. (Oops. He got mad at me after I wrote that last line, because after the line before it, he had begun to imagine that his life was about to become some kind of islamic paradise, only instead of the 70 virgins, he was seeing 70 eternally stocked hot dog stands.)

What I mean is that I will take his normal daily quotient of food, and divide it into lots of smaller meals, and feed him those over the day, instead of giving it to him in one big pile in the afternoon.

What if it works?

I don’t see how it could hurt the dog in any way, and how great would it be if it were that easy to svelticize all the fat dogs in the world? Creating thousands of Tim Gunns where there were once only Michael Moores.

Anyway, I’m doing it. And I’ll let you know how it works. I have a lot of hope.

But now that I’ve made this decision, my little Boston has officially stopped speaking to me.

That’s okay, though.

I probably couldn’t understand him anyway, with that mouth full of penne pasta he just stole out of the garbage can.

Disclaimer

Okay, I’m so used to typing out disclaimers when I write about the Six Word Diet that I almost went: Always check with your veterinarian before you put your pet on this or any other….wait. No, actually I SHOULD include a veterinarian-based disclaimer. For one thing, I don’t want to get sued if you try this and your dog goes Karen Carpenter on you, nor do I wish to receive hate mail after someone tries this on a canary.

And for another thing, perhaps by sending everyone with a fat dog to a veterinarian (which would be 97 percent of all American dog owners), maybe I’ll get a nice kickback on my bill the next time I go to a vet because of my Boston’s having gotten into the 18-pound jar of cheeze whiz I accidentally left sitting out on the table, and my being unable to figure out how to get that little orange smirk off its face.

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