A Peanut Butter Thief in the Night

Although not litter mates, our two dogs are both thirteen years old. When she was less than two years old, Bitsy tore both of her ACLs (at separate times). Who knew dogs had knees? We had both of them repaired. We were told at the time that Bitsy would eventually have arthritis from this. The time has come. Lola, who did not tear her ACLs, also has arthritis.

IN CASE YOU’RE ABOUT TO CLICK AWAY FROM THIS, NO, THE DOGS ARE NOT THE PEANUT BUTTER (PB) THIEVES.

The veterinarian has given us pain medications for both dogs. Sometimes, Lola will just take them out of our hands. Bitsy is a hard sell. To make it easy and for fairness, we put peanut butter on the pills in their food bowls. See, we GIVE them PB, they don’t need to steal it.

Plus, we keep it on top of the set of drawers shown above. Even if the girls could still stand on their hind legs, they couldn’t reach that.

The dogs are fed in the morning and late afternoon. Three mornings ago, Scott got up to feed them and found the peanut butter jar on the floor. The glass was broken, and the lid looked like about a third of it had been gnawed away. I wish we had taken a photo of the jar.

I’m not going to try to explain the hows and whys of this, but we have sort of a solarium/sun room that has several sliding glass doors. We leave some of these open at night to let in the cool air. We decided that for that night, we would keep the doors closed.

We suspected a “weiner dog” that lives two terraces over. She can climb walls and has gotten over here before. That night, we did keep the doors closed. The peanut butter jar was intact and unharmed. Huzzah!

So the next night (last night) we put a small amount of peanut butter in a small bowl and put the jar away in a drawer. Then I remembered that I have a WYZE camera! So I set that up near the bowl.

Yikes! So NOT a weiner dog!

When I first saw this, it looked like a giant cat. Then it still looked like a very big RAT. Whether it's a rat or a normal-sized mouse, IT HAS TO GO!

I’m not sure what our method will be. Scott tends to like to relocate critters that aren’t where they’re supposed to be. I hope I don’t have to pull the happy wife, happy life card.