Rawhide!

When you get a new puppy, one of the things you worry the most about (along with puddles and piles on your floor) is your valued posessions getting chewed up. As small puppies, Bo and Luke both got ahold of things they shouldn't have, but by the time we got Luke, I got savvy to the need to have rawhide bones around at all times. It has become part of my daily dog routine to give the dogs each a rawhide strip to chew on.

Both of the dogs get pretty compulsive, once handed a bone. From that moment on, their aim in life is to guarantee that not a crumb of their bone gets down the other dog's throat, and to that end, they must get said bone down their own gullet post hast. Luke in particular is a bone gobbler, which led to a very messy barfing incident last week that I detailed in the following tweet:

Luke just barfed up a half-gallon pile of warm foamy, partially digested rawhide which reeked of sour pork product. Yargh!!!!

Nice, hmm? That particular incident is the closest I have been to coming emotionally unhinged by a mess made by any member of my family, human or canine. Since then I have become a bit more cautious about freely handing out rawhides to Luke and try to limit him to small pieces.

This morning, I gave each dog a strip of rawhide, and Luke grabbed the smaller of the two that fell out of the bag. Five minutes later there was not a trace of it left, and Bo, was still happily ensconced on the floor of the great room, gnawing at his. Luke trundled off to find Bo in his chewing spot, and proceeded to sit about a foot from his nose alertly watching as Bo masticated the bit of dried pig. Occasionally Luke would inch forward and Bo would emit a low warning rumble from deep in his chest. I got distracted with my usual Saturday morning load of laundry, but this is what I found about 15 minutes later:

Luke is the picture of resignation and sadness, while Bo studiously ignores him, savoring his bone all the more because he knows how much Luke wants it. Later while I was writing this, and Luke had wandered off to lie at my feet, and Bo actually came in to the office and positioned himself with the bone so that he was inches from Luke's face. If they were any more like real children I'd be yelling at Luke for teasing, and at Bo for punching his little brother.