The cupboard was bare – so what was The Contessa going to eat last night?
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Min Pin dogs | 9 comments
The Contessa - a champagne and lobster loving girl
Yesterday I motored down to Newmarket to fetch our medications, visit Waitrose and pick up The Contessa’s trays of diabetic prescription diet from the vet. This food is salmon and rice based as she is extremely allergic to any sort of chicken from breast fillets to derivatives. I suspect the latter are ground up beaks, claws and such like.
Somewhere between Waitrose car park and the traffic lights, where I should have turned left for the vet’s surgery, I forgot my final port of call. Perhaps it was the open bag of Hula Hoops on my lap (no breakfast/lunch) or the dulcet tones of Radio4’s PM that distracted me. Anyway when supper time came I realised my mistake. It was too late to return to town.
You can’t really mess with a diabetic dog’s diet. If she eats fish and rice you cannot suddenly give her eggs and bacon or ordinary dog food as she would be likely to keel over. Her insulin dose is matched to her food intake and the type of diet that she eats. Our vet had been firm.
“She has to be given the same food every single day. Without exception.”
In past emergencies, she has eaten fresh or tinned fish with rice without suffering any ill effects. So as I put some rice on to boil, Danny had a poke about in the larder for a tin of tuna. After a long pause he appeared with a small box in his hand.
“There’s no tinned fish. All I could find is this.”
He waived the tin under my nose. With a Marie Antoinetteish tone he declared, “Let them eat lobster.”
Tinned lobster must have been a ‘Danny buy’ as I had no idea that such a wonder existed. When I peeled back the lid I had a teeny taste. To be quite honest it was like a very superior fish paste – something that I haven’t been pressed to eat since I was a child.
Clearly The Contessa would not have turned up her nose at those loathsome childhood fish paste sandwiches. She guzzled her supper with relish and, rather than lounging in bed until she was called for breakfast the next morning, she was down at the dot of nine. Not a chance of returning to bed with a cup of tea before I’d fed her.
Somehow I always suspected that The Contessa was a champagne and lobster sort of girl.
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Lucky Contessa! I hope she enjoyed her luxury dinner…but not so much that she prefers it to her normal food. Next you’ll be needing to buy her a silk pillow 🙂 haha
Reminds me of when I was young and had to move my cat in with my parents for a while because I moved into an apartment building that did not allow pets. One day at their house I observed the expensive seafood (for humans!) my mother was spoiling my cat with and thought “He’ll never want to live with ME again!” Of course, that boy was a money pit anyway. Gorgeous, very long hair, very outdoorsy, always getting his hair in a tangle and having to go to the pet salon for professional grooming (another bad habit my dear mother got him into!).
Getting her back onto her standard dinners is going to be a challenge! I can see the contemptuous curled lip, pathetic stare and pushing about it is going to get ……
You just have to love a girl like that!
I run out of food occasionally for my 2 big boys, there is no way I could get away with them missing a meal! But it is hard to know what to give them. Last time I cooked them spaghetti with some mince from the freezer – seeing two rottweilers try to eat spaghetti was highly amusing. I have to keep them out of kitchen garden as they have been known to help themselves to the strawbarries and one of them has recently taken to trying to eat the cherry tree! Yes the tree! (only cherry, apples and pears arent to his taste)
Our dogs are fed a raw diet and recently we ran out of mince with the next delivery being days away. Luckily we have a freezer stuffed with two cows so for a while they were dining on pedigree Dexter meat.
Oh poor little thing. Luckily our dog is not diabetic because he helps himself to the veggie garden when he is hungry. I’m trying to stop him with the Organic chili and garlic spray so we will see what happens there.
I am sure Rosie would love to have fresh cooked posh nosh- she looks so longingly at us when we have our food- she gets the same diet everyday of pellets.
We used to give in to our last dog and gave him bits from our meals, but he then bacame a nuisance and also put on more weight.
contessa by name..and in her sophisticated palate..:)