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Profile's Gotcha Day and Hunk's First Gotcha Anniversary, 17 March 2001.
From the time that we first adopted Hunk I have heard that some greyhound owners give their greyhounds Peeps as treats. For those not familiar, a Peep is a nasty marshmallowy thing that is sold every year at Easter. They come in two shapes, duckies and bunnies, and in the colors of yellow, blue, white, pink, and purple. They are basically flavorless fluff coated in colored sugar. Why kids like them I don't know, unless it's the sugar rush that one can obtain from eating a dozen of them. I've also heard that they will grow to giantic proportions if microwaved, so maybe that figures into the attraction.
Anyway, I bought a $.94 pack of yellow duckies to bring home as a treat for my puppers. It's almost Easter, today is Hunk and Profile's gotcha day, I made it through another round of work without going postal...plenty of reasons to celebrate. The dogs were maniacs when I pulled the package of yellow sugary goodness out of the grocery bag, and flung themselves willy nilly down the stairs in anticipation of the "treat" that they would have "before dinner."
I started with Profile, who sat like a perfect gentleman waiting for his "treat." He sniffed it, licked it with the very tip of his tongue, and with a disgusted look stood back up and walked away. Profile will eat ANYTHING. Not yet convinced that I had a flock of mutant aliens living in my house in the guise of greyhounds, I offered one to the other Gotcha Day Boy, Hunk. He carefully took it from me with his front teeth and rolled it around on the floor, licking it and tasting little bits of it until he decided that it was not poisonous nor did it contain pills. He then scooped the entire duckie up in his mouth and tried to chew it.
At that point I knew why greyhound owners give marshmallows. You have not lived until you've seen a dog with THAT pointy of a snout trying to pull the now gooey glob of sugar off the roof of his mouth, and then suck the bits out of his teeth when he was done. He looked like a little old man checking his dentures for treasure.
Jeany, by this point, was about to go ballistic. She had been hopping around, slapping the ground with her front paws and roo roo roo -ing at me since the box came out. Now that she'd gotten a sniff of the Peep that Hunk was still working on getting off his back teeth, she was a dog on a mission. She sat, she downed, she spoke, she sat again only this time ON my foot, and she even tried raring up on her hind legs like a show pony and punching me in the chest. When she settled back down into a "big girl sit" (not the cheating kind where her legs are thrown out to the side) I gave her the Peep.
At least I thought I did.
It disappeared so quickly I'm still not sure. As I was pondering its disappearance I was also pulling off a Peep for Liz. Well, I intended for it to be for Liz. However, it was snapped out of my fingers by an excited and now hyped-up-on-sugar Jeany. She barely left my fingers intact! This one she chewed and again I was reduced to near-sobbing fits of laughter.
I then felt a very cold and wet nose on my arm. Liz was staring at me with her big nearly-blind eyes, ears perked. I could just hear an old granny voice in my head... "What's all this commotion about, young'un?" I held the Peep out to her thinking I'd found the BEST treat in the world for my precious old gal...it's soft, it's indulgent, you don't need teeth for it...
The look on Liz's face while she investigated the Peep was priceless. It was a combination of "what the heck is THIS?" and "Are you KIDDING me? You want me to eat THAT?" She took it out of my hand and dropped it on the floor, then turned her back and walked away. Liz, who eats coffee grounds out of the garbage and has been known to chew on Scott's tennis shoes with her gums wouldn't TOUCH the Peep other than to make it clear to me that she didn't want it.
Jeany, on the other hand, stole it and snarfed it before I could get it back, so she spent the rest of the evening running laps upstairs, from the den to the bedroom and back again.
The remainder of the Peeps were ceremoniously discarded...and I completely forgot to put one in the microwave.
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