Our Princess isn't Princess any more!

I suppose it is my own fault for taking so long to call 24PetWatch.

I'd been meaning to do it pretty much every day since we acquired the Very Fat Dog (or she acquired us). Finally, this week, I thought of it at the right time, about 8 p.m. Wednesday (which just happened to be exactly three months after we met the portly Golden Retriever they called "Princess").

24PetWatch is a pet-identification service. They help lost pets get back to their humans using a computer chip implanted under the skin. Maybe the pet can't talk, but the chip can.

I dialed the phone number on her collar tag and gave Brenda, the pleasant-voiced woman on the other end, the serial number of the ID chip.

"Ah, I have it right here," said a cheerful Brenda. "Cassady, right?"

"No," said I. "Her name is Princess."

"Well," replied Brenda, "that's not what our records show. She's a female about 5 and a half years old, a Golden Retriever?"

"Wow," I responded. "We were told her name was Princess. She's from Georgia. Do you show her as being from Georgia?"

"That's right," said Brenda.

She then offered a date of birth, the same date we were given by the Golden Retriever Emergency Assistance Team when we adopted her.

The two people (that would be my wife and me) looked at each other, flabbergasted. This was quite a turn of events, and I figured there was only one way to tell if this shocking information was true: Ask her.

The Very Fat Dog was stretched out at Jeanne's feet, completely relaxed as if all was right with the world, more asleep than awake.

"Cassady!" I said crisply.

The effect was immediate, as if she had heard a gunshot -- or a ghost. Her whole body went instantly to attention. Her head snapped around as if jerked by a rope. The look in her eyes was shock, awe and deja vu all at once.

She got up and walked over to me, tail wagging.

That pretty much told the tale. I had thought it strange that this dog did not react as strongly to her name as most dogs do. You know, freeze you in your tracks like when a cop hollers, "Stop!" or when your Mom yelled at you with that certain intonation that let you know you were in deep trouble. For most dogs, a clear exclamation of their name will do it. Not Princess. It wasn't that she didn't react, just that she didn't freeze.

So, we now have a dog named "Cassady."

I wish I had asked Brenda how it is spelled. That might give us a clue as to why a lumbering female Golden Retriever would carry such a nom de plume.

Could it be she was named for teen idol Shaun Cassidy? Heaven forbid.

Could she be named for the actor Jack Cassidy, father of Shaun and David who burned to death in his Hollywood apartment in 1976?

Might she be named for Jack Casady, the legendary drummer for the Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna and Jimi Hendrix (whose name is often misspelled as "Cassidy")?

Maybe she's named for Butch Cassidy, as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. She does have some experience with stealing.

Perhaps she is named for Neal Cassady, traveling companion of Jack Kerouac in "On the Road." That would be cool, very Dharma Bum sort of cool.

That must be it.

I'm going to call 24PetWatch again to get the spelling, but, regardless, we will never truly know her namesake, just as we will never know who taught her to fetch newspapers, who let her get so fat, and how many homes (and names) she has had.

That's the thing about rescuing animals. There is a lot you will never know... But you will know the most important thing -- that you made a difference!

The mysterious case of the missing sandwich

The Very Fat Dog is a thief. A food thief.

Just a Sunday ago, I was doing various errands around the house. You know, cleaning and such. Now and again, I would stop by the kitchen island to take a bite of a Cuban sandwich. I suppose it wasn't unusual for 10 minutes to pass between bites.

Cessie, the very fat dog, was hanging on my every move in the kitchen. But that's nothing new. This chow hound doesn't even trot unless she has to, but she comes running for the kitchen any time there is the rustle of cellophane or the opening of a box.

With sad, sad eyes, she looks longingly at whatever food one has, following every move from plate to hand to mouth. It was no different with the Cuban sandwich. She lay there on the kitchen floor, perking up when I would pass by for a bite. I suppose this could have gone on for half an hour or so.

I was busy enough that I actually forgot about the sandwich for a while. So I am not sure when it disappeared. All I know is that, suddenly, there was no Cuban sandwich on the island any more.

I did a sort of double take, wondering if I remembered correctly where I'd left it. And there was Cessie, lying in the same spot she'd been in all along. But her eyes gave her away. She knew she'd done wrong, and her eyes couldn't lie about it.

This dog is the hungriest animal we've ever encountered. She seems to be starving all the time, and when we give her snacks such as carrots, apple slices or raw green beans, it just seems to make her even more ravenous.

We've strictly regulated her diet to 3.5 cups of food per day, about 1/3 in the morning and the rest at the time we sit down to our evening meal. We've walked her religiously every single day, usually two half-mile journeys that Cessie struggles through bravely. (Actually, she's doing much better on the walks, even as the summer heat sets in. But she still walks more slowly than we would.)

Given all this exercise and careful feeding, we were expecting her to have lost a few more pounds when Jeanne took her for a monthly weigh-in at the vet last Monday. Nope. We were shocked and disappointed to find out she'd actually gained a pound this month, to 112.

Sorry I haven't written more frequently of our trials and tribulations with the very fat dog. My travel schedule was crazy in April.