What was this dog eating now?

Our old family dog, Shadow, had been listless and seemed not well all winter.

She had earlier been diagnosed with cancer and even after surgery, well, the vet said there wasn't much we could do about it. Her days were numbered. The dog seemed to know it, too, as she would mope around and lay around a lot.

She hardly ate at all for months. Yet she was getting fatter. This worried me a lot. Could she be retaining fluid because of her illness and old age?

One day at mid-morning, I was in the house working and I noticed her sort of strolling away from the yard. She looked both ways a little warily and truly had a suspicious look on her face.

This piqued my curiosity. I watched out the window.

She walked across the bridge over the creek and headed into some small woods. Where was this dog going? She knew she wasn't to leave our property with me with her?

Very stealthily and often looking around and looking back to the house, she sneaked through the little wooded area and disappeared into an area next door where a neighbor was running some cows and calves. I got up, put on a jacket and quietly went outdoors. What the heck was going on here? This dog was sneaking off somewhere.

As I got to the bridge, I noticed a well-worn trail through the little wood from our house to the area with the calves. What was she up to? This dog has obviously made this pilgrimage a lot of times. I stood behind a tree and watched. Pretty soon it looked like something was moving in the brush. It was my dog. She was returning home. And she had something huge in her mouth.

My first suspicion was that she had a cowpie in her mouth. One of the banes of old dogs, I found, is that they love to roll around in fresh manure. Now that is a habit that you don't want your "house dog" to get into.
I moved out from behind the tree. I confronted my dog Shadow there on the well-worn trail. Now some ignorant folks claim animals don't have feelings. Well, this dog suddenly had a combination of two feelings: fear and guilt. She knew she wasn't supposed to leave the yard and what the heck was she carting around in her mouth from the neighbor's barn?

She didn't wag her tail, which is unusual. She had that look of a cornered animal. That big brown thing in her mouth dropped to the ground. We both just sort of looked at each other from about 40 feet apart.

Finally, I said her name, "Shadow," and she ambled over to me. She still had her tail between her legs and a very, very guilty look on her face. Meanwhile, lots of questions were going through my mind. Is she really sick? Has she started eating cowpies? Is there is a medicinal advantage there? I had never heard of it. No wonder she didn't have an appetite! No wonder she had been sick and listless.

I bent over and patted my dog and scratched her behind the ears. She perked up considerably. I swear she indicated she just wanted to go to the house with me . . . but I had different ideas. I wanted to see what she had been carrying in her mouth.

As I walked back to where she had dropped the mysterious item, she sort of hung back. When we got there, she made no move whatsoever to this cowpie or whatever it was.

I kicked it with my boot and it suddenly became obvious what it was. It was an old cinnamon roll. It was a big old dry one, too, with lots of frosting still on it.

It seems that my neighbor had made a deal to collect some very old donuts and baked goods and had fed them to his calves over the past few months. And by the looks of the worn path from our house to that barn, he had inadvertently been feeding them to my dog, too.

So the mystery was solved. No wonder she wasn't eating her dogfood. Our dog unfortunately has always had a severe sweet tooth and now she was truly getting her fill. We had taken her to the vet and surprisingly found she had gained eight pounds with no apparent explanation - up to now, anyway.

Later, I saw her lying on the cushion of a yard chair soaking up the sun, appearing quite listless and lethargic. It could be assumed she was just an old dog worn down by the years.
But I knew better.

She was bedded down there trying to digest several loaves of bread-type of material as she was dreaming of stalking more mighty Bismarck's, longjohns, donuts, bagels and cinnamon rolls.

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Authorized by William C. Sniffin
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Bill Sniffin for Governor - P.O. Box 900 ­ Lander, WY 82520 (307) 332-3111, ext. 17