Disclaimer: this article is shit, is about shit and everything shit, so if you are not into shit or eating at the moment, don’t read further.

For 29 years of my life the only poop I knew intimately was my own, then the dogs came along. Now I am a professional Poop Inspector and Investigator along with being an expert Poop Hunter and Collector. That’s a lot of titles so let me explain them.
 

Poop Hunter

 
Each of the dogs have their poop zones, their favourite spots, but sometimes I think the pressure comes on suddenly or they decide to set up a treasure hunt and then the shit could be anywhere. Even in the middle of the hall!
 

Poop Inspector

 
Having six dogs means somewhere between 6 to 12 piles of shit. As a well experienced, researched and studied Inspector I can tell whose shit is whose at a distance mostly. By close-up inspection my guess would be right 95% of the time. 😀

Poop Investigator

 
Identifying poop is just half the battle, the second half involves observing, identifying and tabulating what the turd indicates. Special points are given on finding bone shards, coloured nylon chewie shavings, balls of hair, fur and grass. Thankfully I’ve not found anything else, yet.

Poop Collector

 
Poop comes in various states – dry and crumbling, dry and firm, wet and sticky, soft and gooey, liquid gel. The dry and firm variety is the simplest and easiest to pick up. It comes clean of the ground. All the others need a little ingenuity, experience and skill before the art is perfected.

Why is Shit so Important?

 
Shit holds a lot of secrets. I’m not kidding, it’s true you know. Your poop can tell you a lot about your body and health. It’s colour, consistency, ease of passing and smell are indicators of many a thing. Looking at poop can tell you about excess vitamins, malnourishment, bleeding, infections, and much more.
 
I started out a novice, but in the last six years of picking up poop, it’s amazing how much I have learned about and from SHIT!

 
P.S. – Day Twenty-One of the 30 Day Blogging Challenge.

Over the six years that we’ve had dogs, we’ve moved their and our sleeping quarters quite a bit. Sometimes they sleep with us, sometimes by themselves and other times we sleep with them.

Confused? Well, we have clearly demarcated spaces for sleeping at home. The bedroom is our sleeping space and the hall is the dogs sleeping space but we shuffle around. 😀

Every so often we get tired of sharing bed space and the dogs get unceremoniously evicted from the bedroom. Oh the crying we have to deal with for a couple of days. But these bouts of sleeping without the dogs rarely lasts long.

Before we know it we are back to opening the doors to the dogs and cuddling up for the night. Don’t know why we do it considering that that makes eight of us in that room; its not a bedroom, it’s a dorm.

Every night is a new layout, a new pattern. The dogs have their favourite spots and we find space for ourselves in between them all. And then there is Cuckoo who gets up at every sound and when she returns from an inspection expects you to lift the sheet and make space for her. If you don’t, you get punched until you do.

It the reason for the evictions, after waking up a couple of days in a row sore due to weird sleeping positions and sleepless because of Cuckoo’s punching, we’ll tolerate even Buddha whine through the night just for some bed space. So out go the dogs.

There are many advantages to not having the dogs in the room at night. You get the whole bed. You don’t have to doggy proof the bedroom. You don’t have to worry about things lying around. You bedroom doesn’t have a coating of fur. You don’t wake up in the middle of the night to a nasty fart. And so on…

But nothing beats have them around you snuggled and warm at night. I sleep so much better with them around. And I wake up better too, who wouldn’t when you wake up to a doggie face. 🙂

Photo Credit: Chenthil Mohan

P.S. – Day Fourteen of the 30 Day Blogging Challenge.

Ever since the heat set in, the mongrels have been fussing about their food. They don’t like most meat pieces, have specific requirements and the requirements change so fast that I can’t keep up with them.

Especially Elu who has been turning up her nose a lot. The amount she has been doing that has had me worried and I switched to chicken for a bit to ease her appetite. But even chicken she is fussy about. She isn’t eating with gusto.

For this reason and the desire to get the dogs used to more types of food, we tried kibble. Drools Focus seems the reasonable best in the market right, so Focus it was. The first attempt seemed a hit with all except William.

The dogs seemed to like the change in their menu. I’d thought they wouldn’t take to kibble easily after meat but no such thing happened. They pounced up on it, happy about the variety and enjoying the crunch of the pellets.

William the first time we tried kibble did funny things as he ate it. His eyes started to water and he looked dopey for a while after eating. By second day he wasn’t bounding up to eat, had had loose stools and he even threw up. At this point we switched back to meat.

It took a week for systems to settle back down and poop to come back to normal. Then this week I decided to try again. One of the mistakes I made last time was to split the meal into two like I do with meat.

When you switch between types of food, or you introduce a new food/meat, you introduce it slowly and gradually. Instead of doing two meals, I should have done 4 or 5 meals in a day. Small amounts of a new food would be easier on the stomach then a big quantity. That might explain Williams reaction.

Anyway, this time round I went at it slow and did 4 to 5 meals spread through the day. And the dogs seemed to have transitioned better. Tummy’s seemed to have settled, poop is soft but well formed pellets and appetites seem good too.

It’s been a bit more work, feeding six dogs multiple times a day, but the upside is that they and I have had a chance to practice patience. All dogs have had to sit patiently outside the kitchen while one is eating inside. They come one at a time and only when called. They then have to sit and wait for food to be served.

Sounds like a process but when I started out, I was chasing dogs in and out, and doing a lot of other drama too. But doing something 4 times day for one whole week, makes for practice, rhythm, tweaking and good understanding.

It’s amazing to watch Max get better and better each day with his impulse control. Eli is still struggling to figure our the kitchen laxman-rekha but she’s getting better at it. It’s also been fun doing it all with the dogs as the food isn’t messy and icky like meat. 😀

But a week of kibble hasn’t been all good, there are some things that I’m just not content about. Drools Focus doesn’t have corn and hence is the better of the packaged foods in the market. That said, the poop quality though better than other kibble, is still not as good as meat. It’s not hard, compact and only mildly smelly like meat poop, this is poop you’ll remember for a while after cleaning up.

And it’s just the poop that is smelly, even the pee is off. No, it’s not smelly in the stinking sense, but rather smelly in the rich sense. As if it’s filled with nutrients. It’s an overwhelming smell and you can’t escape it. After a week it feels like my whole house smells of kibble pee.

Even the dogs smell different, I think. Over the past couple of days I’ve been feeling the dogs have started to smell kibbley. Dogs should smell I dogs and I’m fine with dog smell but this is body odour.

This week I switch the dogs back to meat and chicken and I’m looking forward to all the smells changing back to before. I wonder how long it will take.

Now that their systems have settled I’m unlikely to ever do kibble for so long here on. I’m going to be switching between kibble, chicken and meats often. Have you done kibble in-between meat cycles? Noticed any of the stuff I was mentioning? What kibble do you feed?

Gawd that was a lot of talk about food, poop and pee. 😛 In other news Max’s ear wax culture reports have come and the Vet suggests a ear canal flushing. One of these days soon we’re going to have to put him under and clean out his ear. I’m hoping the procedure goes off well.

All else is fine on the Pawsible front. See you next week. 🙂

 
P.S. – Day Seven of the 30 Day Blogging Challenge.

It’s been a while since I’ve done regular posts on the blog. It’s good to be back to the mundane but yet I’ll miss the AtoZ Challenge what kept me on my toes.

I planned to write A to Z Things I’ve Learned from the Dogs but I only partially succeeded, as I was lost many a time about what to write. What I did manage though was to have the dogs in every post. It was all about them, oh well, there was always something about them. 😀

Before I get to a quick update on all the dogs have been up to in April. Here’s a quick list of my A to Z posts.

Appreciate – Everything, Even The Little Things

Befriend – More Curious Less Cautious

Celebrate – Thats What Life’s For

Dedication – Keep At It Until You Are Satisfied

Entertain – In All Ways and Forms

Fulfil – Your Destiny

Get Off Your Ass – Get Moving

Holiday – Impulsively

Instinct – It’s a Gut Feeling

Joy – Rejoice the Little Things

Kindness – A Special Type of Kind

Leisure – Stop and Stare

Masti – It’s All About Having Fun

Naughty and Nice – Makes for Some Spice

Opportunity – Grab It

Play – It’s Not Just for the Young

Quality and Quantity – The Eternal Battle

Resilient – Bounce Back, Slowly but Surely

Sensitivity – Unto Others and Yourself

Tolerance – Understand and Accept

Unique – As We All Are

Vice – There Should Be At Least One

Wisdom – What’s Wise All About

Xenial – Hello Stranger!

Young-at-Heart – The Child Within

Zestful – Go For It With Zeal

Now for the updates…

Summer here in it’s full glory and the dogs are showing the effects of the heat too. They prefer to be indoors where the granite floors our cold most of the day. You should see the speed with with they troop in after we have cleaned the house. Wet floors and flooded porches are a particular favourite.

Our bedroom is coooler than the rest of the house me thinks, so they dogs line up at bed time and charge into the room even before we can make it there. Our bedroom’s a dorm in the nights with 8 people sprawled out!

The heat is also showing effects in food. The mongrels both prefer chicken to beef. There is a fair bit of fuss when it comes to red meat, so I’m doing T-bone steaks which the dogs enjoy on some days and chicken in the rest. We’re also experimenting with kibble.

All seem to be taking to kibble well, except for William whose tummy seems to be taking time to get accustomed to it. Last time we tried a three day kibble drill, William acted all funny why eating, his eyes would droop and he’d look dopey as soon as he started eating and the look lasted for a while after. Two days in his appetite dropped.

I’m going to try another cycle of kibble this week. Smaller portions for William with more frequency in feeding. Let’s see how he takes to it this time. One option is to give up on kibble, but I’d like the dogs tummies to flex so this time I’m going to push it slow and steady until William’s tummy settles. Will keep you posted.

Max’s one ear has been bad for a while now. We first tried ACV for a while and it definitely made it better but the issue didn’t completely go away, so we took him to CUPA and started him on a course of antibiotic ear drops. The course also showed some improvement but now the course is over, it seems like he’s sliding back. There’s more goo coming out the ear everyday. Not smelling but sticky dark brown gunk. Time for another Vet visit.

All else is good at Pawsible… As always the pack is making everything possible at Pawsible! 😛
What have you and your fur friends been up to?

The last month or so since I disappeared from the blog, life has been quite the Tora Tora (Tora Tora’s that ride at the amusement park that looks like a twirling girls skirt and goes around and up and down at the same time.) – all topsy turvy and just plain crazy but yeah it’s been fun too. 😀

So here’s my long explanation for the disappearance. 😛

We’d moved house in December 2013 and I was hoping to stay put for a bit but five months later just as we were settling down into a rhythm in May, circumstances changed and forced us to move. Actually it wasn’t forced but it worked out for the best.

The owners of the previous house had issues crop up in their life in Goa and they were forced to move back. They were nice people so they didn’t ask us to leave but rather worked out a way so we could all live together. We on the ground floor and them on the first, but 8 dogs in the house had Che and me scratching our heads and wondering how we would survive.

We also knew that they had brought us some time, but a move in December 2014 was guaranteed, so we started putting the word out to friends that we were looking for a house that would accommodate 5 dogs with lots of space for them, far from people so, complains about their noise would be minimal and life in general would be fun.

As things turned out, a friend got in touch almost immediately saying he had heard of a house that might suit us in Hennur. It was the absolute other end of the city, from extreme South to extreme North. We decided to check it out and met Chaitanya and Anitra, (friends of our friend) who also had two dogs. The house they led us to in their layout had us bowled over at first glance. It had a lot of garden space in front of the house, only one immediate neighbour, three bedrooms and loos, two floors,… We loved it.

Going back after the first visit we talked and then talked some more after reaching home. The gist of all that talking was that moving was going to be painful whenever we did it. And if that was going to be so, why wait until December, we might as well move now when we found a house that seemed like it would work well for us.

Well, next thing you know, we had packed the basics, organised the logistics of moving five dogs, booked packers and movers and moved. I can never be thankful enough for my friends and family coz they are just amazing. They jumped in with all enthusiasm and helped us shift, five dogs and all.

The dogs love the place and space. Cuckoo, my jumping queen seems to have so much space now, that the 5 foot boundary wall doesn’t seem enticing enough to jump over. Even her jumping to greet people has reduced with the distractions that the space provides. And the garden provides all of them ample space to dig and get messy while we chase about telling them off and trying to refill the holes. It seems like a losing battle. 😀

We now also have a guest bedroom on the first floor for family and friends [just in case you decide to visit :D] where they can take a few calming breaths away from the dogs and don’t have to worry about waking up to Senti’s licking or Max’s farts. 😛

It’s been almost two months and a lot has happened. One post isn’t enough to write it all so I’ll split it but for now I can tell you we are all having a ball – learning new things, settling into a new rhythm, sleeping out in the sun, scampering when it rains and other such fun stuff.

Settling in is a pain and will take a while but I am hopeful that this time we won’t move again, at least not soon. 😉