GLUTTONY

Dante knew what he was about when he assigned the hound Cerberus to guard the gluttony circle in hell. Not that all dogs are gluttons. In his brief tenure with us Bebe displayed symptoms quite similar to those observed in young women labeled these days as anorexic. After nursing Bebe through meal after meal we felt relieved to have a dog willing to gobble up most anything within reach. Owning dogs as opposite in behavior as Bebe and Mickey convinced us that a dog's relation to food resulted from his/her genetic programming, that whatever environmental influences we might have introduced did little to explain the totally opposing food habits these two animals displayed.

FEEDING BEBE	FEEDING MICKEY

Mickey was programmed to gluttony. All beagles are, but Mickey even more so. Mrs. Harvey, who owned the beagle farm in which we boarded him while we were in Europe, informed us that Mickey represented an extreme version of beagle behavior. His gluttony was complicated for us by a special factor, namely that he belonged to the taller of the two subspecies of beagle. This subspecies measures roughly two inches higher at the shoulder than the smaller one. Even being 15 inches high scarcely made Mickey eligible to be called a big dog, but the difference between 13 and 15 inches proved crucial to the disruption that a member of a gluttonous breed could bring to a family. This disruption took diverse forms at three household sites:

(1) COUNTER. A kitchen counter is ordinarily a yard high, and ours was no exception. If Mickey had belonged to the smaller beagle subspecies, he would doubtless not have been able to abscond with food from the counter; at most, he might have able to extend his tongue far enough to lick off whatever lay along the counter edge, a crumb of cheese, perhaps, or some drops of beer that had spilled down from the foam. As a 15-inch beagle, however, Mickey had full access to anything within one and a half inches of the edge, and all kitchen operations -- preparations as well as cleanups -- were forced to respect this distance. There was literally no room for error, and one learned to assume that any food within this inch and a half essentially belonged to Mickey. At the same time, we remained secure in the knowledge that, unlike cats and even certain breeds of dogs, Mickey lacked the jumping capability ever to reach beyond this fatal inch and a half.

Trouble arose from two sources. The first of these came from guests who wanted to help out in the kitchen but who had not acculturated themselves to Mickey. We normally discouraged novices from helping, but at one point, trying to assuage the guilt of some houseguests who kept apologizing for their stay, we gave in to their pleas to cook dinner for us. It was to be linguini alle vongole, which the pound and a half of clams they bought (fortunately shelled, or we would have faced an enormous vet's bill) were of course left to the last minute of cooking -- and also, alas, as a result of their insufficient understanding of Mickey at the counter, left within the endangered zone. Suffice it to say that the butcher wrapping for the clams was recovered in one of Mickey's hiding-places, the basin under the apricot tree. Oh, yes, and we concocted a fine meal out of the linguine mixed simply with oil and parmesan.

The second source of counter trouble came not from guests but from our own inability to honor the Mickey zone adequately. Although we knew better than to leave food directly within the zone, it was hard to remember to keep containers out of the zone. As it turned out, Mickey became quite adept at pulling down low-rimmed containers such as platters and cookie sheets. It was one of the latter that deprived us (as well as a houseful of guests) of a meal of Mexican meatballs that had been left on the counter before cooking. To while away the time before dinner, my cousin Craig and I took Mickey up the foothills above the house, and hardly had we got to the top when Mickey suddenly vomited. From the still quite undigested ingredients I recognized the classic Diana Kennedy recipe for albóndigas de Jalisco. By that point I was just as glad to change dinner plans altogether.

(2) TABLE. By virtue of the fact that it is some seven inches lower, a kitchen table poses graver problems than a counter top. Whereas we all learned how to take precautions against Mickey's raids at the counter (though with occasional mishaps due to our own negligence), there was no effective way of guarding the table except to sit as close as possible to one's plate and take constant note of how close Mickey was to you. If somebody in the family got too wound up in conversation to keep an eye on him, you interrupted the narrative to warn of an impending theft. If you had to go to the bathroom during a meal, you shoved the plate to the center of the table, a small area that remained safely out of reach. Occasionally we would put Mickey in his pen to treat ourselves to a relaxed meal -- but, quite aware of the revenge he could wreak for what he must have seen as too many solitary confinements, we rationed ourselves to no more than one such meal a day.

(3) REFRIGERATOR. We would never have guessed the refrigerator could pose a problem. A refrigerator, after all, is like a fortress, and even though Mickey customarily attempted some lunges whenever he saw one of us open the door, we were confident we could contain his urges by keeping our bodies firmly between him and the inside of the refrigerator.

What we failed to take into account was that a beagle has a long muzzle and that Mickey's came to a particularly sharp point. Though the lunges we witnessed at the open door should have provided sufficient warning, we were frankly caught by surprise when we got home one night after a less than two-hour absence at Stanford's Casa Italiana (where the students indulged us in the pizza they had made) to find that Mickey had not only pried the door open, but had managed to escape with the total contents of the two lowest shelves (had he been another two inches higher, he'd have cleaned out the third shelf as well).

Not that he ate everything right away. Before we even had a chance to find him, we took the flashlight out to the pyracantha bush, under which we found two partially finished avocados, a bitten-into cauliflower and onion, stray bits of zucchini and carrots -- all of these pulled out of the vegetable drawer, which lay empty on the kitchen floor (whoever said dogs don't like vegetables?). Nobody believed us after we'd pieced together (partly from wrappers in the bush, partly from memory) a list of what was missing -- at least two kinds of cheese, a pound of wieners, a stick of butter, a pint of cottage cheese. And nobody believed us either when we told how Mickey, once he finally got bored hiding in the garden, came into the house sheepishly through the dogdoor looking like a birthday balloon (please don't find it funny).

It took three days of systematic starvation to reduce him back to normal size. We also had Michael walk him every few hours to encourage maximum depletion. Meanwhile we tortured ourselves wondering how we could ever adjust to his ways or if we'd have to abandon him as we did Bebe. We labeled ourselves inadequate to the role of dogowners. As we deliberated we banished Mickey at night to the dogpen in full knowledge that acts of vengeance might result. And we also installed a magnetic refrigerator door-lock with a magnet so strong it more than matched the force of Mickey's muzzle.
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