Random Musings and Nicknacks

Boy do I hate being outsmarted. Especially when it is by someone who has no right to outsmart me.

About a week and a half ago, we took Punky to the vet for his booster shots. As usual, the vet warned us he may not have an appetite for a day after, and as usual we laughed. Anybody who knows Punky knows how ridiculous it is to think he may not eat.

Except, this time it happened! For the rest of the day he wouldn’t eat his kibble. Then again on Sunday. We woke up, gave him his breakfast, he looked at it and walked away. Didn’t eat a single piece. We brought him back and enticed him a bit – threw him some pieces, which he dutifully ate. Took the bowl away, pretended we wanted it, then put it back. He ate a few pieces, then walked away and sat in front of the laundry room door like he expected somehing else.

Now it wasn’t like he wasn’t eating at all – he would take treats and scraps (I likened it to no matter how sick a kid is, he will still eat a cookie). But we would put food in the bowl at 8:00 in the morning, and by 4:00 half of it would still be there – now I was getting worried – he was still high energy, but to suddenly stop eating was a bad sign. The way he would still sit at the laundry room door and beg scraps, I started to joke that he was on a hunger strike.

Slowly it got worse, until we would wake up in the morning and find food still in the bowl. This had been going on for more than a week now – too long to be a reaction to the vaccine. We decided at this point to call the vet. She was concerned too – it didn’t make sense, and told us to bring him in, and they would check him over.

After a half hour examination they could find nothing wrong. His temperature was high, but we confirmed later that was just excitement.

So we brought him back home unsure what to do. The next day it was worse – we came home to find that all day he had eaten a total of a half cup – usually he eats three cups.

At dinner, I suggested I was out if ideas, and the only thing I could think of was he decided he was tired of this kibble – so to remove that possibility we bought a small bag of a random diffferent kibble.

He devoured it.

We tried the old kibble – he wouldn’t touch it.

The next morning, we gave him the new kibble, I blinked and it was gone.

So next, to ease him over, we gave him a mixture of half old, half new.

He wouldn’t touch it. He took a few of the old kibbles out, spit them in the floor and walked away until we brought out only new kibble.

It appears he really was on a hunger strike. And he won.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.