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Feeding Mr Blake.

Mr Blake is visiting us for a few weeks.

Mr Blake is a retired gentleman of breeding and good manners and has a quiet, pleasant disposition. He is tall, elegant and slim and has a long face. Mr Blake is a greyhound.

(Huey was our last foster greyhound. He is coincidentally one of the April greyhounds on the Greyhound Adoption Program's 2006 calendar. If you happen to have this calendar, there here he is up on your kitchen wall being fed an ice-cream by me. Huey's the one with the long nose.)

Mr Blake weighs 36 kilograms and our task is to get him up to 38. I'll get some nice fatty pet grade chicken mince and cook it with carrot, celery, a little garlic and rice or pasta, supplementing that with supermarket house brand sardines which are cheap and nutritious (the oil restores their coat), chicken frames from the market and bread thickly smeared with butter and peanut butter. Not to forget cheese. Greyhounds love cheese.

Mr Blake is hasn't barked yet, not even when I took him for a walk and he saw a couple of stray cats in the driveway. He did try to leap at them rather vigorously, however.

Comments

  1. I just LOVE greyhounds. I keep trying to talk husband into letting me adopt a retired racer. He keeps telling me they are too large. I keep telling him that they are so used to living in cages that they sleep curled in a tiny little ball. They are so calm, so sweet and so loving. I can't understand why everyone wouldn't want one.
    I once had a friend who worked at the track. She used to care for the greyhounds. I went with her once at feeding time. She let 25 dogs out of their cages and all they wanted was love.
    I'm still working on him.
    Oh and the pooper knows the SOUND of the cheese drawer opening from across the house. Yea, we have a cheese DRAWER.

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  2. I read this and immediately assumed that Mr Blake was a snake - aka Joey Blake!

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  3. Heh, my first thought when I saw the title of this post was "Entertaining Mr Sloane" by Joe Orton. I am sure Mr Blake will be much less stressful around the house.

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  4. Jo, they take up remarkably little space relative to their size. Nor are they boisterous; they pad around the house like royalty. Well, they are royalty, they were companion dogs to the Pharaohs and only in recent years have they been cast as money-spinners for those after a fast buck. (And everyone should have a cheese drawer!)

    Kimbofo, my dad was always telling us to 'keep our eyes peeled for jo blakes' when going mushrooming around Greenvale (where there are now several suburbs) in the sixties.

    Yes, Dr Alice, he should be the perfect lodger, especially now that Goldie's gone. Some of the previous fosters saw her as immediate love interest, although she very quickly disavowed them of the notion.

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  5. You mentioned chicken frames and sardines; aren't the bones a problem?

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  6. They can handle chicken bones just fine, Dr Alice, although it is said that cooked bones can be a problem as they can splinter. I've never had trouble either way.

    We follow (loosely) the amusingly-acronymed BARF diet (Bones and Raw Food), the theory of which proposes that the diet simulates what dogs ate in the wild.

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