She is always entranced by the food-illuminating light in the refrigerator when I open the door; not by the miracle of electricity itself, of course, but by the wealth of edible objects it reveals. She gazes at the shelves of gleaming groceries with spellbound eyes and a quivering nose. You can almost hear the tsunami of drool gushing through her gluttonous jaws.
Observing her in this fridge-hypnotized state, I'm often reminded of archaeologist Howard Carter peering into the golden tomb of Tutankhamun: 'Can you see anything?' Carter was asked. 'Yes, wonderful things,' he replied.
To be fair, the canine food pyramid is particularly dull and unappetizing. Compared to our multi-colored cornucopia it's a shapeless lump of crumbly brown things with a thin stratum of rawhide.
No wonder dogs obsess over our dinners when presented with such dreary rations in their own bowls. For them, a fridge full of people food must indeed be a vision of mesmerizing treasures, especially the back of the fridge where lurks a lifetime's supply of crumbs and blobs of lickable goo.
Alas, just as tomb-plundering Howard Carter was punished by an ancient Pharaoh's curse, so Lola is also struck down after stealing treasure from its rightful home, even if that treasure is only the remains of last night's shepherd's pie. And just as there is no facial expression more intense than Lola's when she's staring at food, there is none more pathetic than her's when she's puking up that same food all over the floor.
