Recounting my psychedelic trip to vet
THE
I consider myself an adventurous eater, if not a brave one.
In a sophisticated twolegged environment such as a restaurant, I would be the type who has a crack at the tripe curry, the ox tongue carpaccio or the pickled sea urchin. The type other diners hold in barely-disguised awe.
On my own patch of river I earn no such accolades. I am shouted at, derided and remonstrated with.
This is because I occasionally come unstuck.
So it was one morning last week after some campers had departed — I always carry out an on-site, post-camp investigation — when I came across an interesting concoction that smelled roughly edible.
That is all a fearless eater needs to scoff it down before the Golden Leave-it-There beats me to it. Eat first — and ask questions later — is more or less my motto.
The thing is, the Leave-itThere has a sensitive — one could say wimpish — digestive system that regurgitates at the first sign of suspect tucker.
Being the athlete I am, my system employs hope over experience, repeatedly attempting to extract something useful from the same stuff — like watching The Boss attack a stubborn lump of yellow box with the splitter.
It was lunchtime before I ran up the white flag and
brought it up, not once but twice. This is a badge of shame for a proud dog but I was past caring. I was wobbling around and losing my balance by this stage and seeing double or triple.
So I was properly dozy by the time I reached the Kialla Vet Clinic — a place I have
come to regard as my second home — with a quick snakebite check to start.
The Boss was worried about that possibility, on account of my history in throttling large brown snakes in a single flick of the head but it was a chilly morning and the wrigglies don’t move fast enough on those days to be entertaining.
The vet ruled that out fairly quickly and suggested drugs were the likely culprit. This naturally left questions hanging in the air and, while she didn’t say anything accusatory, I was pleased to see the whiff of suspicion hovering over The Boss to temporarily take the pressure off me.
Let’s face it, he comes from that generation who smoked funny cigarettes over breakfast while whistling Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds.
For all I know, he has been skulking under a cloak of respectability all these years in the hope no-one would discover he was munching magic mushrooms while listening to The Velvet Underground.
This probably explains his lack of discipline in failing to train me to eat only on command. A patient, committed dog owner who has the true interests of his hound at heart puts in the hard yards over many months to ensure the dog only eats when instructed to.
This is to protect a dog like me from himself — particularly one prone to eating discarded weed.
The Boss reckons he could have done with a dog that was, in any normal sense, trainable — and he looks at me sadly, as if I am the problem. The truth is, he hasn’t got that far with any of his dogs.
Besides, if he fed me until I couldn’t eat any more I wouldn’t need to go foraging after campers’ half-eaten hash cookies. Woof!