NELLIE ON A DIET

When hunting season starts, Mike switches Nellie from her bowl to a perpetual feeder so that she can eat as much as she needs. This works well until the season slows down. And every year the need to switch back to more controlled feedings catches us off guard. Before we know it, Nellie begins to get a little roly-poly. And then it’s tough for a few days as we switch back to the regular feeding schedule.

“I put a little food in Nellie’s dish,” said Mike as he left for work. “I’ll feed her again when I get home.” I took that to mean that I shouldn’t slip her any extra food. 

During the noon hour, Nellie ate what little chow Mike had left for her. After our walk at 2:30, she checked the bowl again and noted its emptiness.  She climbed in my lap, resting her head on my chest so that she could gaze into my eyes. I call that move the “German Shorthair mind meld.” I shooed her off so that I could get to work.

 

Her next tactic was to lie in my way in the middle of the kitchen. When that didn’t work, she asked to go outside. Nellie’s evening feeding often occurs after an outing, so if things are not to her liking when we return from the walk, she prompts me by going out and coming back in. I let her out and she was back in five minutes.

“You just have to wait for your supper,” I explained to her. “I know you’re hungry, but Mike said he would feed you when he gets home.”

She evidently got something out of those words because she plopped down on her pillow with one of her snort / sighs.

Mike and Nellie are on the same wave length when they hunt, but Mike is oblivious to Nellie’s messaging at the house. If she has something to say, she talks to me. KW

The Vintage Housekeeper

"The building of a menu should not have for its only consideration the mere suggesting of something to eat. This is the end, the result; other factors are important as a foundation. The tastes of the members of the family, their requirements in respect to age and occupation, and how these can best be satisfied from the household allowance and the market -- these should be the study of the housekeeper -- that poor housekeeper, who sometimes so sadly needs someone to study her. She who is the unwilling and unhappy target of three-fourths of what is written on the subject of cooking."

Helen Louise Johnson, The Enterprising Housekeeper, 1906 (IRD collection)