Silas versus the Himalayan Chew

My dog is too smart.

Before we went on our trip, I bought Silas one of those yak milk Himalayan chews.

He was interested in it, but he didn’t really like it. He would pick it up and carry it around. He would lick it. But he wouldn’t chew. As an afterthought, I put it in his bag for the trip.

On our second day, he fished it out of the bag and carried it around for a while.

Then I spotted him with . . . half . . . of the Himalayan chew. Just half, and he was chewing pretty enthusiastically.

“Good grief,” I thought. “When he decided he liked that thing he really went to town. It hasn’t been five minutes.

When I went into the other room, there was the other half. It turned out, Silas had dropped the chew and broken it in half. This, apparently, was a vast improvement.

After Silas finished the first half of the chew, I expected him to be similarly excited by the second half. Usually the whole challenge is with “new food,” and the chew wasn’t new any more. But, no.

Instead, he would pick up the second half of the chew, fling it up in the air, and watch hopefully for it to shatter on the ground. It never would. My mother finally whacked it with a wrench and broke the half in half. The quarter-length pieces are a little short for a hard chew from a safety standpoint, but Silas is both supervised and extremely careful.

Now he’s repeating the same procedure with the little quarter that’s left. Pick it up, drop it, hope it breaks. Sorry, kid. We left Grandma’s house. I’m not breaking your chew bone for you.