Animal Insting

Yesterday Mom and Aunt Cheryl and Aunt LaDene (another one of Mom's friends) went to a place called Union Station.  A long time ago, when Mom was a little girl, Union Station was where the trains came in and out of town.  There are still a few trains that come to Union Station now, but not nearly as many as there used to be.  This is because everybody nowadays travels in planes, which are way faster than trains.

So anyway, the reason Mom and her friends went to Union Station was so they could see an exhibit about Chocolate, which is really yummy stuff that is POISONOUS to dogs!  But it's not poisonous to people, so they eat it a lot.  Some people can't hardly get through a whole day without eating Chocolate.

Chocolate comes from the seeds of cacao trees.  You can find these seeds inside the cacao fruit, which is shaped like a football, except smaller.  Cacao trees grow in rainforests, which are found in hot, rainy places near the equator.  There are no rainforests in Missouri because it's not close to the equator.  Even Houston, my home town, is not close enough to the equator to have a rainforest.  But there is a rainforest inside a building at the zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, which is kind of strange, if you ask me.

Anyway, dogs would like to eat Chocolate because it smells really good and it is yummy, but they shouldn't eat it because of its Poisonous Nature.  I did a little research and learned that the reason why Chocolate is poisonous to dogs is because it has something in it called theobromine, which is sort of like caffeine.  This stuff has a Very Bad Effect on dogs.  In fact, if they eat too much of it, they could DIE.  Here is how much Chocolate it takes to have a poisonous effect on a dog:

Using a dose of 100 mg/kg as the toxic dose it comes out roughly as:
1 ounce per 1 pound of body weight for Milk chocolate
1 ounce per 3 pounds of body weight for Semisweet chocolate
1 ounce per 9 pounds of body weight for Baker's chocolate.


This means that if I ate a 20-ounce bar of Hershey's milk chocolate, I could maybe DIE from it!  So I don't think I will do that anytime soon.  And I want to warn all my doggy blog readers that they shouldn't eat Chocolate either, no matter how much they want to.

But now, on another topic, I need to tell you that Barry has been really, really good with Aunt Cheryl.  He hasn't barked at her or lunged at her or tried to bite her even once.  In fact, he keeps rubbing up against her so that maybe she will get the idea to pet him.  Or better yet, give him a treat.

The rest of us dogs have been behaving nicely also.  Well, except for this morning when Gabe jumped up on the sofa right on top of me where I was relaxing in one of the dog beds, and he startled me, so I started a fight with him, and he fought back, and Mom had to yell at us to get us to stop.

Oh, and Hank was a bad boy and opened the door to the cabinet where the kitchen trash can is, and he got into the trash and pulled out a yummy-smelling sausage wrapper, but then Gabe stole it from him.  So Mom had to bribe Gabe with a treat so that she could get the wrapper away from him.  And now the trash can has to live on top the microwave.  Except Mom keeps forgetting that the trash is up there, and she throws trash into the cabinet where the trash can used to be, which makes her say bad words.

But otherwise, we are all having a nice, harmonious time here at our house in Kansas City.