Its a bad sign when you get home and your dog walks up to you already in the coward position, like she did something wrong and knows it was wrong, and is all ready for your reaction when you figure it out . So when Aussie, my brother's Australian Shepard, approached me as I answered the door, not in her usual "oh my god it seems like years since I've seen you" jumping happy attitude, I knew something was up. As I quickly searched the floor for empty food wrappers, made sure that my bedroom door had in fact been closed when I was gone, and
checked my bathroom to see if she had gotten into my trash, I failed to find anything that she did wrong. I headed to the kitchen to make my dinner when I saw it: the empty plate on the counter that used to contain the dozen of cookies I had made the night before. Before I had assumed the worst, the answer that I knew was the most plausible, I called my brother to ask the ridiculous question. "Did you eat all the cookies," I asked my brother Jeff. " No. Yeah like I would eat a billion cookies," he exaggerated. Then I preceded to explain that Aussie had yet again eaten our sweets.
You see this is not the first case of "Dog eats human food when back is turned." It all started while my brother was gone in Afghanistan and I was dog sitting at his house. Being an avid runner and working at a running specialty store where you get all kinds of free running nutritional items, of course I had a bag full of powerbars, gels and other random items stocked up for my training in my bedroom. One day I came home to find that Aussie had gone into my room, opened up the plastic grocery bag that contained all of my running food and preceded to eat a number of powerbars, some of my gels, and a bunch of the powerbar gel blasts (like
gummy candies if you've never tried them before: delicious!!). The wrappers were everywhere in the house, gel goo smudged into the carpet and on the wood floor. And that began the first of many of Aussie's mischievous incidents. Since then she's gotten a bag of Doritos out of the cupboard, made several trips into my room to eat my running nutrition, gotten into my trash in my bedroom, mainly to get the empty powerbar gel blasts wrapper out which she had previously eaten, along with dragging some random items out of the room (lip gloss, body spray, an empty shoe lace box. what did she think was in it??) and, the incident before the cookies, ate a mountain of a piece of birthday cake off the counter.
Now a dog expert might say that she was doing all of this to either get attention or because she was hungry, but she is well fed (in the morning and at night) and gets plenty of love when we are home with her. And the thing that makes it even more ironic is that her dog food bag sits on the floor in the living room, which is more accessible to her than the food she's ripped out of bags and labels or maneuvered off the counter. I kind of think it might be a Pavlov's dog type scenario where she either hears the crinkle of the wrappers and associates whats in it with her own treat and food packages, or she sees us sitting around and eating all of this junk and thinks she needs to indulge in it too. And by now she technically should be really sick or dead, considering all of the chocolate, sugar, and caffeine that she has consumed, and the number of wrappers that she did eat but vomited up the next day when her body wouldn't process them. But she still lives on, scavenging the floor for crumbs and bugging us in the kitchen when we are cooking. I guess I should be thanking her in the long run cause its better she eat all of the sweets and junk than me.
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