A shadow of her former self

I guess that headline is a bit sensational. The dog is not exactly svelte, but she has lost almost 30 pounds now, a third of her body weight.

It hasn't been easy. There were some very discouraging months there in which the Two People and the Very Fat dog were at a sort of weighty impasse. That's probably why it's been such a long time since I updated this blog. I didn't want to admit impasse, let alone defeat.

We went along for weeks and weeks feeding Princess Cassady 1 cup of green beans and 1 cup of diet kibble a day. It was hardly better than nothing. If I were a dog, I wouldn't have eaten it, but this chow hound ate every morsel of anything we gave her.

I mean anything.

Vegetables? She snagged them like a frog snatches bugs off a lily pad. She practically inhaled red-leaf lettuce -- without salad dressing, mind you -- something I've never seen a dog do before. She caught cucumbers in mid-air, chomped on apple cores and craved cauliflower. I can't recall her turning down a thing, even celery. Never have I seen such an omnivorous canine.

She was starving, at least that's how she played it. Twice she stole loaves of bread or packages of muffins off the kitchen counter while we were away. At one point, I wondered if she might run away to find a family that would nourish her with more than love and attention. But I wondered that in silence, as the other person might never have let her outdoors again.

The weight was stubborn. It fought gallantly, as did the rotund Golden Retriever. Cassady continued to lag and drag on our daily walks. She moved quickly only when cellophane was rustled, just to be disappointed time after time when we refused her extra food. Yet still she came.

And she still comes today at the slightest sound or smell that could possibly indicate the presence of food. But at last the weight is melting away, and Cassady is a new girl. She chases squirrels in the yard. She makes the walk around the circle without so much as a pant.

Our princess now weighs 91 lbs. People no longer say, "Wow! That's a really fat dog" when they meet her. And Cassady clearly feels a zillion times better. But that doesn't mean she's happy about it. She's still famished. She still comes runnin' to the sound of rustling cellophane.

The transformation is amazing, though. She's gone from plump to pleasing. The other day, a neighbor who has witnessed this glacially slow change said Cassady looks like she is having a wonderful life, that she is lucky to have found us.

That made us proud.

I just wish I felt better about it. Through most of this ordeal I've just felt mean, vexatious.

I shed 20 percent of my body weight a few years ago, so I have an idea what it's like to be hungry. I commiserate. Those beautiful, sad, brown doggie eyes just couldn't understand why there was plenty of food for us and green beans for her. They couldn't understand why we got top sirloin, marinated and grilled, and she got diet kibble. And those eyes still follow every motion of every fork, knife and spoon in the house. I wonder if that ever will end.

Photo coming tomorrow. I promise.