Yum!!!

[SherriA]

I'm having so much fun with a dog who enjoys fruit and veggies! This weekend I discovered that Henry loves watermelon.

I wish we could still embed videos. Oh well, you'll have to click on the youtube link below for your dose of cuteness.

https://youtu.be/uLVcenF02J8

[Amanda]

So cute! His begging beagle eyes are adorable.

[JudyL]

That is one very happy Beagle. His tail was a blur as he wagged and ate.

[Jen]

So cute!

[UpwardDog]

He is so cute. Beagles are the cutest.
I always think of Tricky when I'm cutting fruit. She was such a fruit hound.

[SherriA]

My little fruit hound scared the crap out of me a couple of nights ago! I was eating a nectarine and he was, of course, hovering around my feet. The fruit got slippery as I got near finishing it, and I dropped it, pit and all. Henry snatched it up before it even hit the ground I think.

Henry has NO drop it command yet. I've been working on it, but been completely unsuccessful so far. (We're making decent progress with leave it, but this happened too fast for that, and I don't know that it's solid enough yet for him to leave a piece of fruit falling from heaven.)

So now I have a dog that's food crazy with a nectarine pit in his mouth that I'm sure could choke him, or at the very least cause a serious blockage if he managed to swallow it. He won't let me open his mouth; he's growling his very threatening warning growl when I even try - he doesn't want to lash out, but he's very clearly saying that he will if he has to, which is his usual way of communicating that he feels threatened and which I always try to respect.

Crap! So now what? I'm running through the doggie Heimlich in my head, and trying to remember if the emergency vet address is programmed into my GPS or not. I'm standing behind him with my hands on his shoulders to keep him from running off somewhere to try to eat his prize without getting in his face (which he always finds threatening). And I'm telling him that he HAS to spit it out, PLEASE! Because, of course, in my panic I'm quite sure he understands English and will respond to that or something. His bag of treats for the dog walker is nearby, so I drop a few of those on the floor. He's interested but not going to relinquish the nectarine for a few Zukes and Charlie Bears. I throw more treats. More interest, but still not enough. I empty most of the baggie on the floor in front of him and FINALLY he spits out the fruit.

I let him eat about two handfuls of treats, because I didn't want him to think that he gave up the nectarine only to get ripped off in the trade. And about an hour later my heartrate finally went back to normal.

Sometimes it was a lot easier having a dog who thinks anything that's not meat is potentially poison!

[emmas_mom]

LOL - I can sooooo identify with this! Eddie would eat anything and everything 'food'. Even though he was a pretty obedient dog, 'drop it' was a command he sometimes chose to ignore. Thankfully, he never swallowed anything really scary - though he certainly got a bad case of the tummy aches and runs the time he stripped every cucumber out of the garden. Weird dog - those were his favourite food, and he'd been known to grab one right from my hand as I took it from the refrigerator crisper.

[SherriA]

Oh cucumbers! I bet Henry would love them.

[MaisyPancakes]

HAHA! Welcome to my world!! I wonder if he would've spat out the pit. Do you remember MP's plum fest? She stole a plum one by one from the dining table or the counter or some thing, and she ate them all under the piano in the same spot, and left a pile of pits there that I found later.

Pile o' pits

plum pits.jpg (50.06 KiB) Viewed 4940 times

I suppose if he were OMGOMGOMG, then he could've totally just gulped the whole thing. If it makes you feel any better at all, MP has swallowed a pineapple core piece (just as indigestible as anything else indigestible, I think), and puked it up 3 or 4 days later. Vet friend said it was probably rolling around for a while because there's only a small opening for something to pass through further, and it just gave up and came back up. Ever since she said that, I haven't been *as* scared of single-item blockages, per se.