In Which Relationships Withstand Regurgitation

I have a little balcony in my apartment, and when the weather is nice, the first thing I do when I wake up is to open the door to the balcony so that Rosie can go outside and sunbathe.  She loves it, and often sits out in the sun while I go about my morning rituals, waiting until I finally grab her collar to head outside for our walk.  Sometimes, though, leaves fall from the trees near me and land on the balcony.  If I am not paying attention, Rosie will often eat these leaves.  Within about ten minutes of eating these leaves, Rosie will vomit them back up.

There is a big elm tree in the dog park, and if I'm not paying close attention to her, Rosie will eat the leaves and vomit them back up.  In the fall, I have to take paper towels with me to clean her up, just in case.  She's not the only dog I know that vomits from leaves, but its pretty rare.  I see lots of dogs eat these leaves and do just fine.  Rosie, however, spasms and hacks and pukes.  She looks extremely unhappy while she's doing it, and even shortly after, with strands of yellow bile hanging from her lips.  I clean her up, and I clean up the little puddle, and when I finish throwing out the paper towels, what do I find?  Rosie eating more leaves. 

Let's be perfectly clear: Rosie is an idiot.  I would think that any creature with half a brain could connect those dots.  Eat the leaves, vomit the leaves.  Eat the leaves, vomit the leaves.  STOP EATING THE LEAVES! 

It is an unfortunate condition of dog owners, and I include myself in this estimation, that we are extremely free with the advice.  People have told me to get a spray collar or a shock collar, or that she must have worms, or that I just need to put more roughage in her diet.  The sad truth is that there is no real solution, except to remain vigilant.  Rosie will eat almost anything put in front of her, and she will eat it to the point of regurgitation, and then she will eat some more.  I once let her run freely around a fenced-in yard for a day, and she ate so much grass that later that night she puked it up in the bed.  Grass.   

She is a wolf, and she eats like one, and owning her has made more aware of the world around in one very specific way.  When I walk down the street, I need to keep a sharp eye out for things on the sidewalk that she might try to eat, despite their lack of any appetizing quality.  Suddenly, every stray pizza crust or crumbs thrown to pigeons become obstacles in my ability to walk happily down the street, and have begun to feel like personal insults.  I grew up on the Upper East Side, and I hated it, but now when I visit my parents I marvel at the cleanliness of the streets and wish I were living there again, if only so that I didn't have to constantly pry my dog's mouth open and pull chicken bones out of her gullet while she makes noises that cause people to stare at me as if I'm an animal abuser. 

It's easy to think of this as being the trickiness of an interspecies relationship, but it's really just an extreme example of the problems inherent in any relationship.  While the other people in my life may not be constantly trying to make themselves vomit or give themselves worms by eating mysterious pieces of crud off the sidewalk, they do other things that occasionally frustrate or confuse me.  The beauty is finding the proper balance: when the positives that a relationship provides you far outweigh the frustrations.  I don't mean to make this sound like a perfectly rational decision-making process; it's far more emotional than that, by necessity.  I couldn't begin to quantify the ways in which Rosie makes my life brighter and happier or difficult and complicated, I just know that, at the end of the day, I'd rather occasionally clean up some vomit than not have my puppy curled up next to me.