“Wet” food

After a month and a half of limping, four visits to the vet, and more than $700 worth of X-rays and blood tests, our poor dog turns out to have Lyme disease. First we thought it was glass in her paw, then arthritis, but it’s neither. Were there deer in Prospect Park in mid-March? The deer’s ticks seem to have been there, which is a little scary.

Even more scary is how the antibiotics must be administered. We tried the old-fashioned way (put the pill on the back of the dog’s tongue, close her mouth, massage her gullet), but she returns the pill to sender after fifteen minutes. So now, for the first time in my life, I must twice a day open a can of “wet” dogfood. This is hard on a part-time vegetarian. Not only must I open the can, but I must also take out a moist clump—it’s waxy rather than moist, actually—and form it into a bolus with the pill in the center. The idea is to maximize the chance that pill and bolus will be swallowed whole, without chewing or any other form of reconsideration.

In the swallowing without chewing category, we are batting a thousand. But I am not so sure about the new intimacy with canned dogfood. Of what substance are the pale granules that stand in relation to the surrounding pink matter roughly as vermiculite stands to potting soil? Is there any way to sculpt boluses out of dogfood without smelling it?