Momentous times – Wuff With The Smooth

Momentous times in the household last week… I gave Waffle a piece of chicken! As you may or may not have gathered from previous weeks, Waffle has a bit of a food allergy thing going on and so as to combat rashes and trips to the vets (and serious outlays of my hard-earned moula), he’s on a fairly strict diet. Up until this morsel of chicken his only prescribed foodstuffs were, fish, asparagus, peas, watermelon and venison. Previous treats for His Hairyness included salmon on Christmas Day and, the odd time I’m making tuna sandwiches, a few crumbs of said tuna from the tin.

However, maybe it’s just me being soft but I find it sort of sad when I’m dismantling a chicken and I can’t even offer him a piece of meat or skin.

“It’s for your own good, Waffie,” I tell him, picking at the chicken and snaffling the odd bit of meat myself. “You can’t have any. It only makes you sick as a small hospital.” And yet, I find that this explanation is more for my own benefit than his.

Worst of all is when I’ve a chicken or roast resting after it has exited the oven. Instead of laying up in front of the fire or in his own bed as he usually does, Waffle takes up residence in the kitchen, underneath the piece of meat in question. It’s as if, even though he knows he can’t have any, the aromas will have to do.

“Maybe we could give him a wee bit of chicken,” one of the little humans will suggest. “And then we could keep an eye on him. Maybe he won’t have a reaction to it this time, since he’s not eating any of the Bad Dog Food.”

The Bad Dog Food, as we now term it, is a well-known brand of dog food which you’ll find in any supermarket or pet shop.

After Waffle had his allergic reactions and after he was ferried to the vet’s for a consultation and after we told the vet what we were feeding him, we were informed in no uncertain terms that this well-known brand of dog food was the worst possible thing we could have been giving him. In hindsight, and even though he’s a dog, we had inadvertently been giving him the worst kind of processed food.

And so, reluctant as I was to rock the boat when Waffle has been rash and allergy free on his fish and veg diet for many a month now, I couldn’t take the lugubrious but hypnotic brown stare any longer.

On the night in question, when I was making chicken sammiches for the following day’s lunches, I decided on the spur of the moment to give him a morsel of chicken. He had been sitting looking at me anyway, his head likely astray with desire with the scent of roasted poultry.

“Here ya go,” I said and dropped a piece of leg meat in his direction. It didn’t even hit the ground.

Waffle’s lightning-fast snap reminded me of a joke on Scottish stereotypes, about how a Scotsman is culturally tight-fisted.

What happened when a Scotsman dropped a fifty pence piece?

It hit him on the back of the neck.

Just to make sure Waffle’s super-quick reaction wasn’t a fluke, I retrieved and then dropped a second piece of chicken. If anything, his mouth-catch was even faster. Blink and I’d have missed it.

I tried a third piece and, faster than a destination once again, Waffle snatched the falling meat out of the air like he’d been practicing for this very situation his whole life.

In the end I probably gave Waffle too much chicken than was necessary, so much in fact, that he didn’t need any dinner that evening. Although that wasn’t to say he was sated – oh, no.

As is the way with family life, I was also called upon that very evening to carry-out a small task, in this case, changing the battery in fairy lights which one of the little humans has situated around her bed. This little job involves a tiny screw driver and even tinier screws and therefore, it wasn’t a matter of mere seconds to complete.

It was only after I was returning to the kitchen to tidy up after the lunch-making that I discovered wee Waffle pretending to be a kangaroo.

I was in my sock soles at the time and so the hound didn’t hear me approaching. Turning the corner into the kitchen, I stopped in my tracks. His Hairyness was up on hind legs hopping up at the worktop, bouncing his way along.

At first, the strange thought occurred to me that he might be having some kind of a turn or fit, perhaps brought on by a large ingestion of roasted meat and a side portion of exuberance.

However, I realised almost immediately that the focus of his attention (and the hind legs and the hopping) was merely an endeavour to try and catch a sight of the chicken carcass which remained on said worktop.

The taste of the meat was probably still in his mouth and he could probably still smell it, but because of his diminutive stature, he couldn’t see it, never mind snag any.

“What are you at, kangaroo-dog?” I enquired, with a heavy frown.

Waffle dropped to all-fours, craning his neck, caught red-pawed. Then he whined as if in apology, backing away from the worktop.

It was only after he had removed himself from the scene that I noticed that he had leaked a little, on the kitchen tiles. Thinking this was a by-product of the recent chicken-y excitement, I swore under my breath and steeled myself to clean up yet another mess. I turned to reach for the kitchen roll and some spray but only then noticed what the leakage really was.

Waffle was salivating so much over the chicken and its wondrous scents, he was drooling all over the place. This realisation made me smile although that smile froze into a grimace with his next move.

Waffle shook himself, one of those big shakes that starts at his head and goes the whole way to his bum and the remaining globules of spittle in his beard (of which there were many) were flung to the four winds, which is to say, all over the kitchen cabinets.

Momentous times in Waffle’s world last week… He’s still alive.