My dog once thieved a whole, partially frozen twenty pound turkey out of the sink where it was thawing. He managed to get about sixteen pounds down before he gave up. I found him in the morning passed out on the couch, belly-up, looking like a stranded cetacean. Our two cats were doing face plants in the leftovers.
He was rather smug and farty for a couple days, but lived to tell the tale.
Am I being wooshed? I put my hands in my dog’s mouth all the time.
When I was young, we wormed our horses by mixing a powder into their grain. Quite a few of our horses were somehow able to sift this out, and their stall would be left with a completely clean feed box, except for the wormer powder in a little pile in the center of the box. It seems incredible that a horse could sort out this powder from among the other grain in there.
So we would have to resort to pouring molasses or corn oil onto the grain to wet it down, and then sprinkling the powder on that, and mixing it all up. Then the horses were not able to separate out the wormer powder. I don’t think they even tried – they were so eager to gobble up this sweetened grain that nothing slowed them down.
You know, maybe that’s why they did that: are they smart enough to think ‘if I refuse to eat this wormer today, tomorrow I get molasses in my grain!’?
Over a book? Really? That’s pretty low.
No whoosh. Thanks for the warning, though! Nothing personal–I actually like you quite a bit–it’s just that a dog’s maw has got to be one of the most disgusting caverns of horror and bacteria known to man, and considering how bad the whole animal smells from several feet away, I have no desire to have any more contact with them than I have to. They’re simply filthy animals. If you love them, that’s great. They need that. But I, for one, will not share the joy of their wet, smelly love. Same for horses, BTW.
My Mom and I have had dogs all my life. We’ve always fed free choice (i.e., dog-food available 24/7), but we’ve never had a fat dog (well, except for one with an unresolved thyroid problem…). Even the ones who came to us completely food-obsessed quickly calmed down when they realized that there would always be more coming (I believe feeding free choice is actually beneficial for many types of food issues). Of course, we give them lots of exercise - 2 hours of cross-country hiking every day keeps you thin (dogs and people too 
- I gained way too much weight when I moved to a city and became dogless), and we’ve mostly had high-energy, lean breeds to begin with.
Of course any people food that comes within reach gets inhaled instantly…
JRB
We would probably free-food our golden retriever, since he stays very slim no matter how much he eats, but alas, our lab would quickly become a sausage with four little feet sticking out if we left food out all the time. So we regulate their food carefully, to make sure the one gets enough and the other not too much. It’s a challenge.
Our lab will eat or drink anything – he drank from the gutters in the French Quarter once (gag!), and he ate a box of erasers my son had bought for school. But we took him to obedience school and taught him the "leave it!’ command early on, and that’s kept him from eating a lot of stuff he might otherwise have scarfed down.
Talk to your neighbor about training the dog. One of these days it’s going to snatch food from a child, or eat something that it can’t pass, and the owner is going to end up with either a confiscated or a dead dog. Both of which will be 100% the human’s fault.
Oh, come now. They have mildly anti-bacterial saliva and oral bacteria are largely species-specific. The scientific word is that between human and canine mouths, one can’t really be considered “cleaner” than the other, just host to different bacterial colonies. Plus, there is that whole hand-washing phenomenon.
It’s okay not to be a dog person, and I admit I’m a bigger dog geek than most… but I will say (verified by unsolicited and independent sources) that my dog does not stink either from several feet away or right close up* and that is due entirely to his diet.
*He is occasionally disgusting, filthy, cavernously-mawed, and/or horrific, though. 
I bet you’re used to it, and/or you’ve learned to love the dog’s smell because it’s associated with the dog. All dogs stink to high heaven, period. I have yet to meet one that doesn’t. Their fur is home to entire nations of living things. I have a classmate who cleans pools, and he says that the instant a dog gets in a pool, that pool is completely disgusting–and unusable, or at least extremely aesthetically unpleasant, to humans–because all of those little clans get washed into the water.
I will concede the point about their mouths. But their mouths stink even worse, and well, yeah, I can wash my hands–I can wash my hands after handling Petri dishes of e. coli, too, but there’s a reason I don’t work in a biotech lab even though I have a biotechnology certificate. It’s not going to kill me or hurt me in any way, considering the wonders of chemistry and medicine that we all keep right next to our sinks, but I still want to minimize my exposure to it because I find the entire concept unpleasant. And like I said, to me, they’re filthy animals. It’s like how non-smokers think that cig smoke is disgusting, but smokers think it’s the nectar of the Gods. I never quite understood the difference until I went from non-smoker to smoker and then back again. Nothing wrong with that, just keep the cigarettes and the dogs away from me as much as is convenient.
I’ve only met one that does.
Post of the Day.
Imagine this dog pulling this stunt on an unsuspecting 4-year old. Lawsuit waiting to happen.
I’ll second this for post of the day. I giggled.
Well, normally I’d agree, except that’s why I added the bit about it being unsolicited and independently verified. People comment all the time that he doesn’t smell, like it’s some sort of bizarre canine aberration. We were at a picnic a few weeks ago and a little kid was petting him. Her mom came over, started patting the dog, gives both him and me this really weird look, sniffs her hands and says “He doesn’t stink! Why doesn’t he stink?!?!?!” In the same incredulous and slightly offended tone of voice in which you might ask “why is that carnivorous pony eating all the hot dogs?!?!??!!”
I’m tellin’ ya, it’s the raw diet. Apparently species-appropriate food negates the dog-stink.
For the record, my parents’ dog, a lovely golden retriever, eats Science Diet and smells like several things have died in his fur, and not recently.
I don’t mind doggie smell most of the time, and I don’t care if people put their hands into their mouths, but people who kiss their dogs on the mouth? Makes me want to vomit. YUCK.
Of course we are talking about the species - and I like dogs - that eats poop and its own vomit.
My former housemate had Great Danes. One of hers was Basil. I have lots of Basil stories. I’ve spoiler boxed the really squicky part of this story.
The one that comes to mind after reading this thread is the day that Basil decided that bird seed smelled good. And the follow-up a couple of days later.
Basil noticed the birds going to and from the bird feeder in the backyard, and got curious. Being a large Great Dane he had the height to actually rise up on his hind legs to take a look at the feeder, and see what might be in it. And he had the mass that he could lean on the feeder’s pole, and bend it down to the ground, spilling out all that seed onto the ground. I can’t say what the exact progress was, for when we found out what had happened we’d simply found the bird feeder bent over at an angle bringing it to within about a foot of the ground.
My housemate cursed and muttered and started talking about looking for a more sturdy bird feeder.
Then she saw what happened a day or so later.
Basil had ingested the mass of bird seed in one lump feeding. And it proseeded to leave in the same manner. And, well, canine dentition is not suited to grinding seeds up. Rather what he must have done was simply gulped the seed whole. Because they were coming out the same way. Imbedded in the normal matrix of excreta.
Consider that for a moment, please. Imagine passing something that’s studded with innumerable seeds, some of which were sunflower seed.
My housemate had the pleasure and misfortune of watching this. She said that his eyes were rolling incredibly, and he was groaning, as he passed this load. As she was still annoyed about the broken bird feeder, she enjoyed seeing him reap the rewards of his gluttony.
Until she noticed that the birds were coming down, and picking the seed out of the steaming piles.
She decided, after that, she didn’t really want to feed the birds, after all.
Besides diet, there is something else you can do for a stinky dog – get them bathed! Properly! It might cost a bit, but I’d happily pay to avoid stinky dogginess. I work at a grooming shop, I can make your dog not stink, at least for awhile. I promise.
I do not like dogs licking me on my face, at all. It does happen a fair bit because when they’re on the table they’re at a good level to sneak one in, but my own dogs (either my family’s, or future dogs of my own) do not get to do that. Ewwwwww. I don’t understand the people who encourage that!
We sell this expensive organic whatever dog food, that you mix your own meat in with, and I must say that none of the dogs I know that eat it smell at all, and not just the owner’s two that get bathed every Monday. I’d feed it to my own dog, if I had one right now, it does go a long way.
I’ve seen a case where a puppy gorged itself on food and the kibble soaked up his stomach juices and expanded to such an extent that the stomach was squeezing the spinal cord and cutting off blood supply running in the dorsal aorta (the main artery that supplies everything south of the chest). The owners elected to euthanize.
Please, please, for the love of 'Og, make sure the diet you are feeding has been looked at by a veterinary nutritionist. We’re starting to see a number of malnutrition cases because people were scared off of packaged dog food after the melamine incident.
And I’d lay even money that your parent’s dog just needs a bath.
Well, at least the Lab had the decency to eat the paper towels, so you didn’t have to look for some when it was time to clean up said mess.
I can’t wrap my head around the people who encourage their dogs to do this to other people and then babble about how “cute” it is. I do not want a faceful of dog saliva for any reason whatsoever. I don’t care if it’s cute. It’s fucking disgusting, and I don’t want it.
Not to be gross, but you can’t say something like that and not link it for the morbidly curious.