In which I unstress about the relationship between my dog and my grandmother.

Bindu is fat and listless and can’t finish an entire dog walk around the perimeter of two city blocks. Her belly’s bloated. Her nose is dry and she’s tired all the time. She’s clearly not feeling well.

The week Grandma was out of town, Bindu did much better. I fed her water and Iams and nothing else, and after three days of such cruel denial she perked right up and her overall health and energy levels were much closer to normal.

This morning I told Gramma – again – that she’s got to stop over-feeding my dog. At first she said she wasn’t feeding them that much, that they aren’t getting any people food and only a whole can of wet food each day along with all the dry kibbles and Moist ‘n’ Meaty they can possibly stuff down their gullets… I explained to her that a 30-lb. animal needs about one cup of food per day, and could she please just not feed Bindu anything but dry kibbles and water? She said she can’t feed one dog and not the other because it’s not fair. I asked her to just close the hall door and leave Bindu in the back then, because otherwise she’s going to kill my dog. At that point, she more or less said that the dog ‘lives with a grandmother and is going to be spoiled, period’, and changed the subject.

I might have to find a doggy daycare just to keep my girl from having a food-induced heart attack; I don’t know how else to get the situation handled. I love that dog, but short of quitting my job and being home all the time I can’t keep her from being over-fed. I’ve asked nicely, I’ve asked intensely, and yes she’s tried to feed them less but she’s been in the habit of spoiling her dog rotten with food for a decade, and Bindu finishes everything Chipper doesn’t eat because she’s more alpha than he is and that’s just how dogs function and it has nothing to do with hunger at all: the fact that the dog is eating does not mean she’s hungry. The only way to solve this problem is to leave less food lying around, and it’s okay, Chipper won’t starve! Chipper will eat if he gets hungry enough; he’s omega, not dead.

Yesterday I ate Mexican food for lunch at the joint across the street from the office (it was raining out and the place was convenient). I had a book with me and absently finished off everything on my plate while reading. Maybe it wasn’t a lot of food by typical standards, but I’ve been paying attention to portion sizes these past couple of months and the result of such gross overeating was that I ended up with an absolutely brutal case of food coma: My stomach hurt, my heart felt labored, I was sluggish and exhausted and just so uncomfortable that I hovered on the verge of having a panic attack. I was a total retard for two hours, and it sucked.

Digestion is the single most energy-intensive function the body performs. Most heart attacks happen after a meal. Overeating can kill you.

And that’s how my dog feels all day, every day. Food coma. And she’s got a heart murmur, and she’s packing on extra weight, and I can’t get my grandmother to just lock my fucking dog out of the kitchen while she kills her own pet with kindness.

It’s not like Bindu doesn’t love her new life at Gramma’s house; she adores the rigid schedule and the big yard and the nice lady who indulges her and the little black dog who lives there too. I don’t want to keep her away from the house or anything, and I’m abjectly grateful that I have somewhere comfortable to leave her when I’m out working and playing…

The bottom line is that the woman comes from an era when they didn’t have dog food. Dogs ate table scraps and they died a lot; there weren’t any scientifically formulated bags of dog food lying around when she was a kid. Spoiling a dog is a kindness by her lights, not a cruelty. And I get that, but I want my blue dog to have a nice, long old age too.

I’m caught between Scylla and Charybdis ^[def] and it suX0rZ ^[def], but here’s some cute pet porn of my blue girl.