Me: You didn’t eat your chicken. You seemed to like it, you’ve been eating it most of the time.
Zora: I don’t want it anymore. I want the meat baby food.
Me: I can’t give you just baby food, Zora. You’re too big. I’d need to feed you twenty jars a day.
Zora: All right, I’ll have the London broil, then.
Me: You know you only get London broil when Brett has leftovers. You can’t have steak all the time, it’s too expensive.
Zora fixes me with the eye.
Zora: Look. We both know I probably won’t live until Christmas. I’m old, and my heart is all fucked up. It’s hot, and it’s humid, and that makes me not want to eat anything but special food. Like baby food.
Me: I know. But I can’t offer you a buffet.
Zora: You figure how to make my food special, and I’ll eat it. I won’t eat it all of the time, because that would make things too easy on you, but maybe some of the time. Enough that I won’t get too skinny.
Me: I’ll see what I can do.
This is a dramatization. The reality is that Zora is starting to get a little senile. She has started to wander a little bit, both mentally and physically. My PotPot is still in there, she just gets a little lost sometimes. That is what she would say to me, though, if she was all there.
Her heart seems stable, none of her symptoms, like the coughing, have worsened much. She seems to feel okay. Getting her to eat is our biggest problem right now. Ground beef, ground turkey, cooked chicken and raw chicken are all out. Pasta is out. Liver is also a no. She will eat some of her mush. She will eat cooked beef pieces with Worcestershire sauce, and meat baby food. So, I have to figure out how to disguise something calorie dense and not too expensive as baby food. Blenderizing raw chicken and mixing it with baby food did not work. Blenderized cooked chicken with baby food is next. If Zora were a little dog, we could just keep her going with baby food until the weather breaks. Unfortunately, Zora is not a little dog, she’s a big, sick, old, picky dog.
Take a few teaspoons from a can of Tuna in oil and mix with her food!
works every time when our Afghan refuses to eat!!
If she's crafty as the Shiba… she would roll it around her mouth and spit out what she doesn't like.
Example: Scottie's cheese singles trick won't work. Freakin' dog move it around his mouth like a piece of gum until there's nothing left except the pill itself.
I'm dealing with pretty much the same problem right now, but of the feline variety. Heat and sickly animals leads to misery for everyone.
Zora will not be fooled by flavoring. I've already tried blenderized raw and cooked chicken mixed with the baby food she likes, and it doesn't work. Offer her the baby food, she will eat all of it. Off something else, and she might eat a few bites, or she might just turn away in disgust.
Dave: that doesn't work around here, either, except with a few dogs. I've gotten very, very good at shoving pills down throats because the food trick doesn't work.
a, I shaved Zora bald two days ago to help her keep cooler. I haven't seen any difference in her food consumption but she seems a little more comfortable. She's lost a great deal of muscle but she isn't as skinny as she felt through her hair.
Have you tried tripe? Raw tripe is super stinky, which means that older or sick dogs who aren't as interested in food are often times more interested in some nice, stinky tripe.
I have food rules, and tripe violates all of them:
Easy to get (no, must be ordered)
Cheap or at the very least inexpensive (no, because it must be ordered)
Almost always available (no, because it must be ordered)
Zora is already violating the Second Rule of Food with her steak phase, which seems to be phasing out. She did eat a little bit of ground beef and ground turkey on Monday.
She tends to fixate, and if she fixated on something that I wasn't actually able to get on a regular basis, that would be bad, because she holds out for what she wants. Just mixing something into her regular meals doesn't work. She isn't fooled.
Looking at my records, she first got baby food on 7/30. Zuulie was getting baby food intermittently then because she was still on the azathioprine and felt pretty badly, and baby food was all that she'd eat. I gave Zora some, too, because she seemed interested in it. Whoops.
Note to self: do not give big dogs that develop food fixations any kind of food that comes in tiny jars.
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