New puppy challenges

Stormageddon is a great dog. She’s smart, and very friendly and happy, and she loves to eat. I should clarify, when I say she likes to eat, I should say that she likes to eat anything that even slightly resembles food. Other dogs in my life have liked to eat, and liked food, but not to Storm’s extent. She eats just about anything.

• Grass and grass clippings are a favorite. Shasta used to roll in grass, turning himself green, but as far as I could tell, beyond the occasional snack, he didn’t eat grass.
• Paper, especially paper that might have had food on it at one point (like a dirty paper towel or a tissue). McKinley used to raid the trash can for tissues, but he just chewed them and spat them out. Storm may be spitting them out, but it’s hard to say, in the blizzard of tissues when she’s found one.
• Of course, people food makes her almost manic, like most dogs. I carried some cherries out to the hammock, and I thought she was going to jump into the bowl she wanted them so badly. I wouldn’t give her any, mostly because I was afraid she’d eat the pits as well as the cherry flesh.
• But the worst thing that she eats regularly is slugs, well, slugs and snails.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, and one thing we have a lot of is slugs (and snails). I tell my friends my puppy eats slugs and they say “ooo, can she come to my garden?” But they don’t understand the true horror of it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been trained from a young age not to like snails and slugs are a close second. My mother used to have me step on the snails that she found in her garden. At around age 10, I thought to ask her why she didn’t just step on them herself. “Because I don’t like it when they scream,” she answered. To this day, I can’t step on a snail without cringing. And that is after I even asked a High School science teacher if snails could scream when you stepped on them. He told me that any whistle or squeak sound you might hear would only be the air escaping from their shell as you crushed them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn’t relieved by that explanation. But screaming aside, that’s not the problem with Storm and her favorite snack. After all, slugs don’t have a shell to whistle or squeak when puppy teeth crush them. No, the problem is that slugs are like peanut butter. They glue themselves to her mouth. She walks around after eating a slug with slug guts dripping from her jaws. Literally! Yesterday morning I thought she had grass hanging out of her mouth. So, before I let her come in I reached in to get it out, and we almost discovered if she’ll eat barf. Who am I kidding, of course she would! Slug guts feel exactly as disgusting as you might imagine they do. Luckily she’s cute. [caption id=“attachment_598” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Luckily for her, she’s cute, even if she does steal my chair[/caption]

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