supposed<\/em> to be taking vitamin E every day, but she balks at that. All of these things are intended to help bring her liver enzymes back into the normal range. She goes back to the vet for a blood test on Monday, at which time we’ll find out if they’re working.<\/p>\nUntil today, she’s seemed more energetic and hasn’t had any of the symptoms that clued us into the liver enzyme problem to begin with. So that’s good. But today, she’s dragging around like everything hurts…we could hardly coax her out of her crate this evening for after-dinner treats (laced with antibiotic, of course).<\/p>\n
Abbye is the pickiest pill-taker in the canine world. You can imbed a tiny pill deep in a piece of steak and she’ll mouth it around until she swallows the steak and spits out the pill. It reminds me of that cartoon bit where the guy lays a cigarette paper flat on his tongue, pours a heap of tobacco onto it, pulls it into his mouth then pops out a neatly rolled cigarette ready for ignition.<\/p>\n
We’ve found one technique to thwart her pill-avoidance system, however. It requires careful planning and the execution must be flawless, but when it works, it’s a thing of beauty. The key is to get her into a rhythm of eating succulent morsels. She’s always suspicious of the first one, so it’s important to make it undoctored and then to have two more treats ready in quick succession. The first one primes the pump, the second one delivers the payload and the third one is presented to her as an incentive to down the second one without worrying it too much.<\/p>\n
Sheesh. I can’t believe I just wrote that, or that we have to resort to such tomfoolery. Such is life with a canine princess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We had a sick dog before James Lileks did. But his recovered quicker than ours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbye","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2692"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12689,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2692\/revisions\/12689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}