Overweight American Dogs

I previously wrote about our struggle with Big Ras Bob the Giant Mutant Mountain Poodle when he developed systemic cancer - a dog version of Hodgkin’s Disease - and our surprise that there was actually a chemotherapy treatment for dogs. Which we of course invested in, hoping that maybe his cancer would go into remission as it sometimes does with people who undergo chemotherapy.

It might have added three months to his life, though in the end we did have to take him in for “The Shot,” crying all the way. The most awful thing about the chemo was that it not only made poor Bob’s beautiful hair fall out in fistfuls, it also made him gain weight like nobody’s business. Some of that was no doubt the drug effects themselves, but another part of it was that he was voraciously hungry all the time and we just didn’t have the heart to deny him. By the time he died he was at least 20 pounds overweight, which is a very considerable amount for a fine-lined dog such as a poodle.

It reminded me of a friend we had way back in the 1970s, who was sort of short and chunky even though he was a confirmed vegetarian. I figured it was just his particular frame and metabolism, because you’d have to eat a whole lot more carrots, spinach and rice than he ever did to put that much weight on. He had a dog named Fasha, a mostly white beagle-like mutt with serious attitude, who proved the adage that people and their dogs tend to look alike. Fasha was as chunky as our friend, but actually did eat enough to account for it.

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Poodles and Cancer: Is this breed-specific?

Three years after what was left of my family moved to our mountain in North Carolina following the tragic death of our son and business partner SkyPup, we lost Uncle Bob the Poodle to systemic cancer. He’d been with us for 9 years as a certified member of our family as well as our family entertainment troupe.

It broke our hearts, even though we still had Kenya, our female black with the improbable registered name of “Kenya Queen Reba Amelia E.” - our Flying Poodle. She was 5 years younger than Bob, purchased from a breeder in Savannah as a mate for Bob (in hopes we could pay for haircuts with occasional puppy litters). We’d wanted to make especially sure their bloodlines were not closely related, having researched the issue of interbreeding and prevalent cancer and not wanting to make that mistake.

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