Sunny's pre-breafast snack...

Living with greyhounds is always an adventure.  Living with 7 greyhounds is sometimes just insane.  We have a pack, known affectionately as the "Brindle Mafia," mainly because all but one of them is a brindle.  The most senior of these crazy greyhounds is Sunny.  A 12 year old retired broodie, she has one annoyingly bad habit - she LOVES yard cookies.  All the rest of the greys have to wear muzzles (except Fritzie, our token GOOD greyhound) because they will snark and snap at each other and/or get into things that they shouldn't; Sunny wears hers because otherwise she will indulge in yard cookies when she goes outside.

It snowed the other night. And it has been very cold outside since, so we  still have about a half an inch of snow on the ground. Because of this, we figured we didn't need to put Sunny's muzzle back on before she went outside. This morning, I learned first hand that this is not going to work. 

I got up and did the first morning turnout.  This meant this morning, that i let them all out and then cleaned up all the accidents in the back hallway and kitchen because not all of them went out last night for last call (Comp is not good about making them go and he did the last turnout last night).  So imagine my reaction when I had just gotten all the poop and pee cleaned up and let the poor freezing greyhounds back in, only to have Sunny bring her morning snack with her... a huge frozen pile of  POOP!  Of course, she did not get any further than the back door with her 'treat' before it was confiscated and relegated to the trash.  I was not pleased, but I can't say I wasn't amused.  Apparently, the poop must age a certain amount of time before it is deemed edible by our little old lady, because there was enough 'yard cookies' on the floor this morning to fill her food bowl to overflowing.  Thank goodness for that!

Now to understand Sunny better, and why this is funny, you kind of need her backstory.  Sunny came off a very deplorable greyhound farm.  One of the backyard breeder type places, that even the NGA took exception to.  They helped me get this place closed down and the owner banned from owning and/or racing greyhounds for life.  We took 26 adult (or nearly adult) greyhounds and 6 unweaned pups off this farm when we closed it down, and Sunny was one of those greyhounds.

Sunny has always been skinny, since coming off the farm.  She had several different foster homes, including one with a vet who raises and breeds show greyhounds, and none of her fosters could get her to eat consistently.  She would eat for 2 or 3 days and them go off her feed for a similar length of time.  We were all frustrated.  Because of this and her age (she was already 9 when we took her off the farm), she was never spayed.  She just would not be a good candidate for surviving anesthesia.

Finally, after several years, Sunny found a foster home that loved her so much they decided to adopt her.  Unfortunately, soon after her adoption, her family had some serious reversals of fortune, and they AND Sunny ended up moving in with us and our pack.  It was while they were all living with us that we started to understand the pattern of Sunny's eating habits, or lack thereof.  It seemed that she would be fine for a couple of days, then she'd have a bout of vomiting and that would throw her off her feed for several days until she was so hungry that she would start eating again.  It was a fairly vicious cycle.  We tried everything.  We thought it was maybe an intolerance of the kibble, so we tried changing that.  She'd have about a week of eating before she'd be right back at the same old routine.  Her mom and I discussed this and decided to see if perhaps it was a disease related issue, so we took her off to the vet who then ran tests and discovered that she had Giardia.  So she got a full 2 weeks of antibiotics, and she improved.  For a while.  Then it returned, and we were no further along.  I talked to the vet, and he suggested that we give her the antibiotics for a slightly longer period - perhaps she just had a bad case of it.  So we did.  A month went by, and we ended the meds and within days of doing that, the Giardia was back.  The consensus from the vet, her mom and me was that she had chronic Giardia and may need to be on the antibiotics for the remainder of her life.  Thankfully, after about 3 - 4 months, when we did a week's worth of break from the meds, she did not go back to her usual routine, so we guardedly decided to see how long she went before getting sick again.  She didn't, the Giardia was gone!

Sunny is still with us, because her family ran into even more problems and had to give her up, we hoped temporarily, but it has turned into a long term situation that isn't going to get better any time soon, so she is now a part of the Brindle Mafia.  She is still skinny as a rail, but at least she eats all her food every day and manages to find room for the occasional yard cookie when we forget to put her muzzle back on after breakfast.  This silly old girl has managed to make it thru some pretty horrific things and reached the ripe old age of 12, in spite of her tendency to eat things that should cause her to have a return of the Giardia.