Cure for doggie fur balls

Until recently we had two golden retrievers. The older one is still alive but is prone to fur balls which usually manage to manifest themselves at about 3am when he insists on waking us to do something about it.

We’ve tried all the usual stuff including letting him go out and eat grass to make himself sick. The best thing we have found is a stick of celery. This is digestible yet stiff enough to push the furball down into his belly and send him back to sleep with a full stomach! Accordingly, we try to make things like celery and carrots (another option but not quite as good) into treats. Like many retrievers, he suffers with weight problems and I can’t see that feeding him roughage like celery and carrots isn’t a damned sight better than high calorie ‘doggie snacks’.

The end of summer

It’s been a short but hot summer here up in the mountains. Our oldest dog doesn’t venture far from home these days as he overheats. He is, however, prone to nocturnal jaunts to our nearest neighbours whom we’ve dubbed the ‘Hillbillies’ namely because they seem to resemble the ‘nouveau riche’ hicks of the tv series inasmuch as their brand new house is already surrounded by bits of farmyard equipment, animal dung and there is a mad old woman who spends most of her day running around it crying, “Chee” in a very high-pitched voice to her chickens.

Needless to say all their dogs are securely locked up in cages all day long. Apart from a couple of very small ones, they don’t ever seem to be let out. Our dogs wander over there from time to time (against our wishes, of course) and wind up the resident canines. We have a sneaking suspicion that our mutts somehow get to eat their food.

No doubt we will get a complaint one day soon. That said, we’ve been here a year now and not spoken to each other. We get on ok with the other people on the hill except for the guy who runs the hotel and who served us that inedible, greasy meal at 25 Euros a head (see this blog).

The outdoor swimming pool has finally been chlorine-shocked and sheeted and the pump put on ‘casual duty’. The winter storms haven’t really started yet but one is scheduled for tomorrow and we know that the north wind that blasts sub-zero temperatures up our valley cannot be far off.

That said, we’ve still been cropping strawberries and the odd raspberry although there don’t tend to be too many left after the dogs have picked them. The tomatoes go a similar way, too.

Now, we just sit and wait to see if our new under-floor heated, double-glazed option room with insulated walls and ceiling and thickened north wall are up to those gales we can expect. More to follow, no doubt.

Our dogs and fruit

Damaris has just come in from the garden. Our dogs have been eating all the tomatoes and strawberries again. They just walk past a bush and browse on its contents. It started when we were back in England. The oldest dog, Newton, would follow me around observing what I ate. I realised this when he started eating loganberries off of the bush we had.

The other key to him observing was with the grapes. Perhaps foolishly I gave him a grape. Having a soft mouth, as retrievers do, it wasn’t in his nature to bite the grape so he just sat there with it in his mouth looking a bit lost. Then he saw me bite mine and that was it. Grape eaten – can I have some more, please, master?

It’s not like their short of fluid – we’ve just had water-melon for lunch and they had a fair share of that off of us, too. Water-melon is probably the favourite although apples go down well, too. Pascal, the retriever we had to have put down in January (chronic cancer of the spine) was once clocked as having eaten 10 apples in an afternoon. My own suspicion was that he ate the over-ripe fallers which had just started to ferment and which, I would guess, tasted (and were) a bit like a mild scrumpy. He certainly slept after one of these apple binges.