Category: Animals

A couple of days ago, while I was working from home, Rowan pulled paper towels out of the trash that had I used to soak up beef fat and began eating them. I’ve had my new trash can for four months and thought it was impenetrable. It is tall and has a lid heavy enough to keep Rowan out, or so I thought. What pissed me off most about this is that Rowan jeopardized the kitten. Stitch Murphy was sitting right next to him trying to join in on the fun. By now I know that Rowan has a stomach of steel and is in no way prone to pancreatitis but he could’ve made the kitten really sick. I yelled at him and he ran to the bed and did this pose. I really can’t stay mad at him for long, he is uncommonly cute.

I’ve been thinking that, when you have a little dog who is as food motivated and hyper as Rowan, it is like being the parent of a toddler who never grows older and is hell-bent on eating anything that remotely resembles food. Part of my relationship with Rowan involves discovering and putting an end to his food retrieval techniques. For the longest time, I kept bread, rice, and tortillas (since I use these items pretty often) on a waist-high rack that is in my woodblock island in the kitchen.

Well, one night while I was sleeping (this is before I began locking Rowan in the bedroom at night) Row Row perfected the method of standing in the lowest rack of the island while nudging food items through the space between the wood slats to the end of the rack and, finally, getting out of the island and standing on his tip-toes to retrieve the food items from the edge of the rack. I woke up in the middle of that night to find Rowan just finishing off a bag of corn tortillas. He had already eaten an entire loaf of onion dill rye bread and half a bag of uncooked rice. FYI, uncooked rice just goes right through them pretty much unchanged. Before this incident, Rowan got some uncooked rice but I couldn’t figure out how and I didn’t know that he ate the rice until I saw his rice poop the next day.

Anyhow, I took Rowan to the emergency clinic that night to induce vomiting and he ended up being just fine. I called them when I was leaving to find out the cost of these things and to tell them what my dog had done. When I walked in the door the receptionist said, “That little guy ate all that? I thought you were going to bring a lab in.” No, my lab was still sleeping like an angel at home. Then, and I’m really not making this up, Rowan shit on their welcome mat.