"Eat Your Dinner Lucy Pants!"

Feeding Lucy has never been hard. She used to plow me over, stepping in and spilling her water, and knocking the measuring cup of food from my hands to get her puppy chow. Then I made a mistake and to get her to come up to the kitchen when we were leaving, and had to put the gate up, I would put a couple chow morsels in her bowl and she would run right up to the kitchen. Easy. Now she learned and when I fill her bowl, she will not come into the kitchen by her place mat to eat. She thinks I am going to put the gate up. She sits on the top step of the stairs and looks at you. I couldn't get her to eat the other day, so I put one morsel on each step leading up to her bowl. It worked but only that time. Now I have to put her bowl at the top of the steps and she leans up from the first step to eat. What a challenge! She isn't as eager to eat like before. I don't know if it is just too much food at once, but she eats and takes a break, eats. Bassets are not grazers, they eat all their food at once so you can only feed them twice a day or she would eat all day long and get big and tubby large! It could also be that her teeth hurt her because her front "fang" teeth came out the other day and those are vital to eat. When she is put down for surgery, they are going to clean her teeth and see how many she has lost, and how they are growing in. (If they are not straight, what do they do? Give her head gear?!) I tell her every day, as I sit on the top step feeding her one puppy chow morsel at a time from my hand "Eat your dinner (breakfast) Lucy. You have to get big and strong!" Travis just shakes his head and says "She is so spoiled." She is. The red bowl she is eating out of like a good puupy is a plastic "Milkbone" bowl the people gave us when we adopted her.