Maggie and the 'Mailman' Cookie

Most Labs have a reputation as the garbage can dog. They will eat anything. Maggie is a complete exception to the rule. This fact was brought home to me recently when I gave her a vitamin in her dinner. Her response had me thinking of other dogs we have had.

Poko was a high energy dog. There wasn't much she did at medium speed. It was pretty much full-steam ahead. She was 10 years old before I noticed she was taking her time eating her meals. I timed her one day and it took her 45 seconds to empty a bowl... and I thought she was eating slowly!

Poko would eat anything. She ate a bar of soap---on two occasions! It wasn't enough to do it the first time. The memory didn't stay with her nearly as long as it stayed with me. Soap is not readily digestible, and the clean-up is, well, let's just say I guarded the soap bars closely after that! She ate charcoal, cardboard boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and hard boiled eggs in the shell. After she dug up poisonous plants in the yard with nary a hiccup, I stopped worrying about visits to the vet.

Another dog we had was much more mannerly in her eating habits. She ate her dinner at a more normal pace. She preferred fruits and vegetables and would steal tomatoes and bananas off the counter. She could peel a tangerine, eat the sections and leave the peel in one piece. She was well-behaved in her eating habits, and we could balance food on her nose that she would catch it as it fell.

Enter Maggie. While Maggie is nearly perfect in every way, she is an absolutely picky eater. Unlike Poko she is a cautious, quiet eater who nibbles each kernel. She will sniff any food item and investigate it before adding it to her diet. There are days when she doesn't eat at all. Until recently if any of her food fell on the floor it stayed there---for days. She only ate food that was in the bowl. When the vet, the lady at the bank or the guy at Petsmart offers her a cookie, she politely sniffs it, takes it in her mouth, drops it on the floor, sniffs it some more, and sometimes walks away.

This brings me to the current situation. Maggie has a new vitamin called a "People Vitamin" that I add to her dinner. They are shaped like a little mailman or a dogcatcher, etc. Maggie has not yet accepted the new treat. When she finishes her meal, there it is. A little mailman sits in the bottom of her bowl.

The vet worries a little. He's given me pills to give her on days she doesn't eat her meal. I don't worry about her at all. She just has her own way. I guess there's a little "Goofy" in all of us. For this normally sedate dog, the mailman waiting in the bottom of her bowl is Maggie's way of reminding me she's NOT a garbage can dog.