Our Beagle Boy Cletus had a vet appointment coming up and for once I was kind of excited about it. For the past several visits, we were told he had gained weight and the doctor was unhappy — with us. Us — because Dave and I have the power to control Cletus’ eating habits. Or so you’d think.
When we adopted him, Cletus was three years old and weighed 28 pounds. In the intervening years, we have babied Mr. Cletus — maybe a bit too much. Everybody says he’s spoiled — he’s not, he’s pampered, and there’s a difference. He’s also more than pleasantly plump.
So, I made some new rules. No more people food and no chicken strip dog treats. It didn’t help — he still went up a pound or two. OK, newer rules. We can do some people food — like green beans and pepper sticks — and cut out the chew sticks completely. Nothing but rib bones for a while. I was sure he had lost a pound or two.
Nope, he gained two pounds. OK, the newest rules. He can have all his regular treats, but in smaller quantities — each chicken strip gets cut into 10 pieces. No more than two fancy chew sticks per day and no bread — no carbs in the people food. And when the season opens, we’re going for a nice long walk at our camper.
I ran that walk through my head a million times trying to figure how we could take Mr. Cletus for a walk and not bother the other campers. We all need the exercise so somehow, we’re doing this. We’ll just go early before everybody else even gets up.
I fully expected our 11-year-old Beagle Boy to get tired and thirsty, so I had a bottle of nice cold water for him, a breakfast beverage for me and my inhaler.
And off we three went. Cletus did great. He sets the pace for us and loves the walk. He can’t wait to get from one smell to the next. Dave, on the other hand, was dragging. His sugar was going low. We had water, a red-eye (beer and tomato juice) and a long way to go to get back to “civilization.” I didn’t even have my phone with me. Ugh. Rookie mistakes. We managed to come across a kind soul who shared their private stash of Twinkies. Dave’s sugar came back up and we plodded along back to our camper.
For the second walk, we had water for Cletus, a candy bar for Dave, a red-eye for me and my phone, but forgot my inhaler. I was the one dying on that trip, barely making it back to our hill.
I really thought we were ready for our third walk. I even found a fanny pack at a thrift store to carry our things — candy bar, inhaler, phone. Our major flaw that time was time. We left about 45 minutes later than usual. By walking around the back side of the lake, we rarely if ever saw anyone the first two times. Not this trip, we ran into several people going for morning golf cart rides who wanted to chat. Cletus wasn’t into that. He doesn’t get new smells standing in one spot and it was getting hot. We were all dragging that morning.
The good news is we managed to learn something each of our first few weeks of walks. The best news is at the next vet visit, Cletus had lost a pound. One whole pound. That’s the first time in his life with us that he lost weight. So we gave him a fancy chew stick as a reward when we got home. He made happy feet noises as he raced across the linoleum in the kitchen with his prize.
Fat and happy is still happy.
