A little while ago we had a dog visit us and stay overnight. As a result we had 3 dogs – Sancho (ours), Molly (the house owners’) and Paris (the visitor). Paris’s owners had left her with a few packets of food and treats. These were left on the kitchen bench.
Danita and I needed to go out for a couple of hours. Thinking everything would be OK we left the 3 dogs to look after themselves. They were getting on nicely and so we thought “what could go wrong?” – a very dangerous thought as it transpired.
Molly’s owners had warned us she’d worked out how to get onto the kitchen bench so we needed to be careful about leaving anything on it. Naturally, in the midst of the vast amount of information we were getting about how to run the house such as Molly’s needs and habits, who the neighbours were, when the cleaners would be coming, when to put out the rubbish etc etc little bits of information slipped through the net. As it turned out this was a particularly important piece.
On our return from our short trip, Danita & I went to feed Paris something from her food parcels. We couldn’t find anything on the bench and were wondering what we’d done with it all. Naturally, we both went into “where did you put Paris’ food?” believing each of has had moved it somewhere without telling the other.
Going into the lounge room we discovered what had happened. The floor was littered with empty food packets and half chewed containers (again thoroughly empty).
Clearly, as soon as the “parents” had left there was a concerted effort to get onto the kitchen bench, get all the interesting items onto the floor and then work together to remove the container lids and open the packets. We were reminded of the kids getting into the alcohol cupboard as soon as the parents had gone out. One can only imagine the joy the “children” shared with their clandestine party. If it’s possible for dogs to have a contented, cheeky look on their faces these 3 managed it.