Weight control

 

Weight control

                                                Anticipation!

Some dogs are permanently ravenous. They don’t seem to have an off switch to tell them their stomachs are full and can take no more. Some medications can cause this.

Double anticipation, with Jellicoe adding to the tension.

The many tablets Frodo the Faller took every day to control his epilepsy had the effect of making him hungry all the time. He wasn’t as severely affected as some I heard about. One dog was so driven to eat that all food had to be securely out of his reach, or rather, he had to be contained in a room where there was no likelihood of him getting at food. Otherwise, he broke into fridges, freezers and cupboards – nothing was safe when he was in the vicinity of food.

                                        Would you like a carrot?          

However, some Labradors and Flat-coated Retrievers are insatiable and it is not their fault. It really is due to their genes, or rather a genetic mutation that insists they are starving and makes them liable to gain more weight than is healthy for them. A study has shown that about a quarter of Labrador retrievers and two-thirds of Flat-coated retrievers have this genetic mutation. It has not been seen in other pure-bred dogs. The affected gene is POMC (Proopiomelanocortin) 

The research says: The POMC gene and the brain network it affects are similar in dogs and humans and the new findings are consistent with reports of extreme hunger in humans with POMC mutations, who tend to become obese at an early age.

The study showed that dogs with the POMC mutation burn 25% fewer calories while sleeping than dogs without it. The ancestry of Labradors and Flatties includes Newfoundland water dogs, who were used from the seventeenth century to bring in fishing nets from the icy waters . These dogs worked hard, so increasing fat reserves to allow them to work without freezing was essential.

Wait!

Roxy waited so patiently until she started to drool.

 It is possible that breeding from the best working dogs led eventually to the 'insatiable' gene being passed on and becoming common. One good stud dog can sire hundreds of puppies. 

Anticipation!

Our Labradors have always been interested in food and, on occasion, have joyfully 'found' an endless source of food - that is, when the dog food has not been safely stored - but they have never eaten themselves to the point of illness and any rotundity has soon dissipated.  

Tension in every fibre of his being.

Gilbert the Good - a Monty Don dog

 

 Gilbert the Good – a Monty Don dog

I told you a while age that my humans call me a Monty Don dog. Monty Don presents a television programme called Gardeners’ World and there are two dogs that help him, a Golden Retriever and a Yorkshire Terrier. I’m more the size of a retriever – well, I am a Labrador Retriever, so that makes sense.

Anyway, I think I could offer my services to Monty Don if he ever needs a stand-in, say if his dogs are on holiday or something. I like helping in the garden. I even bring things indoors sometimes – the odd branch, perhaps, or I particularly like flower pots and I don’t mind if they’re full or empty.

               I like to stick my nose in when Janice is weeding. Some of the things she pulls up look quite appetising. She pulled up a lot of mint the other day as it was growing everywhere, even in the pond. I like mint. It smells wonderful.

.Barry has been pruning trees and then he does something called ‘graunching’ which is very noisy. I stand well back. I don’t like loud noises.  He uses a big machine and wears things on his ears and over his eyes – I don’t know how he can see what he’s doing! Then he puts all the graunched bits back on the garden. He says the graunched bits are now called ‘mulch’. There’s a lot I don’t understand but I’m willing to learn. I could graunch some branches for him if it would help. He wouldn’t even have to take them off the trees.

I like smelling the flowers. My humans told me that Buddy Liver Spots liked to stand among the plants in the conservatory. He hated getting wet, so never went swimming, and always walked round puddles if he could, but loved to run through long wet grass. He was a Dalmatian, though, and I’m a Labrador, so we are quite different.  My long-ago relatives used to help the fishermen haul in the nets in Newfoundland and I’m sure my distant cousins still do. All Labradors have partially webbed feet so we’re all good swimmers.

I don’t like going into the garden when it’s raining and neither does Roxy, but we love to go walking when it’s wet. Bertie, who came before me, didn’t like going out in the rain when he was a puppy. If he needed a pee he used the cats’ litter tray. I haven’t done that and I’m too big now, anyway. I’m a good boy – I know that because my humans keep telling me I am.

Anyway, back to being a Monty Don dog. I think  I’d enjoy being on television. Lights! Camera! Action!

 

TTFN

Gilbert

Camera Critters #72 noses and paws

I love dogs' noses. Jenna-the-Labrador was playing with Gentle Dominie yesterday. Dominie really enjoyed it. She can't initiate play now but she's still very much an alert and interested dog. She comes into the kitchen every evening nose a-twitch when I'm preparing supper just in case there are any titbits to be had.

A dog's sense of smell is thought to be 100,000 times better than a human's. Dogs can smell things as diverse as drugs, electricity, underground gas pipelines, insects in woodwork. They can smell week-old human fingerprints. Specially trained Jack Russells are used to detect brown tree snakes in the loading bays of aircraft in Guam. Dogs can even smell illness and can alert their owners to pending heart attacks or epileptic seizures. Their accuracy in detecting some cancers is greater than hospital scanners.

A gentle nudge from a dog's nose is one of the most trusting and loving acts a dog can perform.

I also love dogs' paws. These belong to Jenna - she has amazingly large feet for a relatively small dog. Labradors' feet are slightly webbed making them fast and efficient swimmers. In their original homeland of Newfoundland they were used by the fishermen to haul in their nets from the icy sea. Their thick wiry coats insulated them from the cold. A Labrador's coat can hold an enormous volume of water and onlookers are advised to stand well away when one or more Labradors emerge from deep water unless, of course, they like a cold, usually muddy shower!

Thank you to Misty Dawn for creating this meme and to Misty and Tammy for hosting it.

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