Junk food and other edibles...

On Lyka’s second day home, in her initial forays into our backyard, she found an interesting creature that seemed to transport itself by hops and leaps. To the rest of us it’s known as a frog, to her it was some strange new critter that begged further investigation. She poked her nose at it and tried identifying its smell. When that didn’t work, she tried to lick the frog, determining whether it was food that she had not been exposed to yet. The frog in its panic at this giant fur ball invading its personal space gave off some kind of resin to protect itself. Apparently it’s fairly common. The minute that stuff touched Lyka’s tongue, she recoiled in shock and started making faces like the kind you do when you taste a pill in your mouth. And tried desperately to remove the taste of the frog from her tongue.

Unfortunately she seemed to have some kind of side effect to the chemicals in that resin, and began to froth at the mouth. We called our vet and demanded he come over immediately, even though it was well past office hours. When he arrived, I think Lyka had subsided a little. Our vet said there was no permanent damage and that the frothing would pass. Then he explained the mechanics of the frog and why Lyka was behaving the way she was. I don’t think she was ever enamored with jumping, hopping creatures ever again. Little did we know that this was but the beginning of her fascination for ‘junk’ food – and I mean real junk.

We started taking Lyka on walks around our colony and she would smell and explore every nook and cranny of the roadside with that eager, excited look that you can always identify a puppy by. When she thought we weren’t looking, she would also pick up cigarette butts and other assorted disgusting things from the road and happily munch away. As though she was being fed enough at home! A sharp reprimand would garner a guilty look from her but never broke her of her habit, until the last few years. There have been times where we had to forcibly make her spit out whatever garbage she had in her mouth.

The one time that she explored the world of cow dung (I’m not making this stuff up), she fell very ill with a gastro problem. For the next couple of weeks we would take turns feeding her barley water through a syringe dropper and crushing medicines into her food. Expecting her to swallow a pill on its on would only result in her giving it a cursory smell and have her walk away from the offending object. She eventually recovered.

It was only the beginning of her nine lives.