Poor Zoe has mobility problems. He likes to lie on the sofa, but he doesn’t like jumping any more. He can still do it, but it takes him a few tries to work up the courage.
This is what he wants.
He doesn’t like jumping down much more than he likes jumping up.
The cats were hanging out around the driveway as usual when we took this picture. It shows Chloe and her son, Dusty. Can you see Dusty?
He’s hiding in the flower bed. He does that a lot. Sometimes we’ll walk right by him when he’s lying next to the driveway because he’s the same color as some of the rocks we have there.
Robin commented in the previous post about the size of a persimmon seed. Here’s a picture of a seed from one of the two trees where Zeke has been finding and eating persimmons.
It’s small enough to fit onto a dime, but still a relatively big seed. I could certainly see that eating a large number of these seeds could cause digestive problems for a dog, but I don’t think the seeds from one of two persimmons will cause any harm. Nevertheless, I’m going to try to keep Zeke away from them. It’s going to be hard, though, because he seems to have developed quite a taste for them.
Just for the sake of information, here is the entire fruit from which the seed came.
I don’t know whether every persimmon has four seeds, but the seeds are a large part of every fruit. It’s hard to tell from this image, but there is not much persimmon in a persimmon.
Zeke found a ripe persimmon on our walk today, and he liked it. That didn’t surprise me, because I remember my old dog Jesse standing on her hind legs eating persimmons off a small tree in my parents’ yard, many years ago. Now, since the possums have been pruning our two persimmon trees, there is a veritable fortune in unripe persimmons lying on the ground. I piled up most of the limbs here.
This happens to be on the route that I use when I walk the dogs around the house. Zeke was naturally interested.
Most of the persimmons are still yellow, which means they are green. A few have ripened, so to help him out, I found a couple. You can tell when they’re ripe because they’re soft and pull away from the stem easily.
Zeke can tell when one is ripe because I hand it to him.
Most Web sites I checked say not to feed persimmons to dogs because the seeds can cause irritation or blockages in the small intestine. That’s probably true, although eating whole persimmons doesn’t seem to cause the foxes any problems, at least judging by the number of seeds in their scat.
I think Zeke is big enough that he won’t have any problems passing the seeds, so I’m not worried. Still, I don’t recommend that anyone else feed their dog persimmons. I don’t feed them to Lucy (she’s far smaller than Zeke), but she isn’t interested anyway. She prefers marshmallows when eating unhealthy treats.
This is Zoe and Zeke sharing a few moments together in the sun.
They aren’t buddies, but sometimes they tolerate each other because they both want to lie in the sun.