211 Big Plates

There is a ‘thing’ going around which suggests that if you want to lose weight, you should put your food on small plates.  Your meal then looks bigger snd you can get the satisfaction of clearing your plate without eating masses of food.

This suggests that human beans are easily fooled if the simplest possible optical illusion can fool their brain easily.

We dogs are not so susceptible.  We measure the quantity of food by what arrives at the stomach, not what (appears to) leave the plate.

Anyway, I digress. This was all brought to mind by my experience this week..    Someone had dropped a bag of chips on our road, only about 20 yards from my house.  I spotted it (actually sniffed it using my superior sense of smell)  immediately TOWTSH (I keep forgetting that you now know he is called John) took me for a walk in that direction.  By straining at my lead, I managed to reach the chips before John was aware of their existence and managed to eat two of them before he saw them and pulled me away.(They were delicious, cooked in beef dripping not thatt oil substitute.)

On subsequent walks that day (I think it was Wednesday but I could be wrong), I made a beeline (dogline?) for the chips but John was on his guard now and always managed to keep me away. 

But I have s better food location memory than most humans.  On my first walk the following morning, I walked (as unpurposefully as I can manage) towards the chips on the big plate (well, the road is quite big) but …. they had disappeared.

After the walk I went to my bed and, rather than sleeping, tried to work out how they has disappeared.  I have two theories.

Some interfering, busybody, killjoy neighbour had cleared them up to maintain street cleanliness and hygiene;

OR

The motor vehicle traffic (a few cars, lots of builders’ vans and quite a few online delivery vehicles (the goods had been online, not the vehicles) had squashed the chips into the road surface. 

On next walk, I tested theory 2 by going to the spot (I told you I have a good food location memory) and licking the white(ish) marks on the road.  Yes.  They were ‘essence of chip’.

I was so pleased.

My scientific theory had been proved correct by direct observation of empirical evidence.

AND

I had a road to lick clean.

Unfortunately, John did not agree - and at first lick he hauled me back indoors.

I thought the philosophy was to ‘let licking dogs lie’.