The danger of killing your dog with kindness

SONNY didn’t so much walk into the consulting room as waddle.

He had picked himself up painfully from his normal position, which was to lie prone – much like an exhausted, beached whale – and headed towards me, his belly swinging slowly from side to side, his chest heaving gently and his expression downcast.

This once joyous, bouncy Labrador was now morbidly obese.

He weighed more than 55kg, around twice his “fighting weight”. And something really had to be done about it.

It had all started when he was retired from his work as a gun dog and rehomed to the nice old lady who lived down the road.

He soon became accustomed to a life in front of the fire – it was so much more comfy than his kennel.

Oh, and the food. He felt like he had moved from the soup kitchen to the Ritz.

And there was plenty of it as his new owner loved to slip him a wee digestive biscuit. Or a piece of toast. Or cheese.

Pretty soon, he learned that looking at her with those big, begging, beseeching eyes inevitably and reliably produced a morsel. Or two.

Combine all that with a huge reduction in his exercise and you can see why he morphed from a lean machine into, em, a blob.

It’s all very well telling an owner about the problems this can cause.

Diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, respiratory complications, liver and kidney abnormalities and skin conditions can all be exacerbated by obesity but, for me at least, the most important issue here was Sonny’s demeanour.

He was miserable. Completely and utterly miserable. He had discovered, like so many before him, that being smothered with wellmeaning but ill thought-out kindness was not the utopia he had imagined.

It is not easy to look an owner straight in the eye and say, “You are killing your dog.”

But sometimes you must. And, to be fair, the old lady knew it already so we devised a plan.

She understood it would be months in the making. Progress would be slow but it would happen.

She accepted his normal weight was the target and gave up on the idea that he wasn’t that fat.

She realised begging did not equate to hunger and we worked out an exercise regime that would do them both good without causing harm.

We calculated his food intake and she weighed every meal.

We allowed for a strictly limited number of daily treats – and we agreed to weigh him every two weeks.