Lucy's New Lifestyle

As hard as yesterday was on every human involved, being ditched was the worst for poor Lucy. When her family arrived, we exchanged a few uncomfortable moments but I didn’t expect our encounter to be pleasant. After five minutes, they pulled out of our driveway, and my discomfort was gone, but that dog is still rattled twenty-four hours later. She’s anxious and quiet. She’s confused. It’s not easy restraining my maternal instincts, but we haven’t been coddling her. Instead, we’ve been letting her figure things out on her own.

Lucy’s adjustment at the Farnival is going to be a little harder than I had assumed because…well… Lucy is fat. This is a new problem for me. I don’t think I’ve ever had a fat foster dog before. Normally, they come here all skinny and hungry. But with Lucy, it’s hard to distinguish her waist from her hips, a balloon with four paws. And she’s only two years old.

When Lucy was fixed four months ago, she weighed a healthy thirty-seven pounds, but now she weighs fifty, meaning she’s gained almost 25% of her body weight. That’s a lot of weight for a an animal that reaches my shin to be carrying around. Needless, to say, Lucy’s lifestyle started to change drastically this morning, when she began her day with a four-mile walk, then came home to a carefully measured-out cup of food and no treats. I’m curious to see how long it takes for her to reach a good weight, so I’m going to do a weekly weigh-in.

4/29/15, Week 1: Lucy = a solid 5-0.