[Dailydrool] Morse - Scavenger Extraordinaire

[Rebecca Stanton]

I know bassets scavenge, I know they love food. But Morse seems to be almost verging on the obsessive.Here are the facts:

1      We used to feed the fox at night in the garden, but it has got to the point that Morse hears one of us get up in the night and shoots to the back door to go out and heads straight for the fox food, frozen solid or not. Once out there (I will have raced ahead to pick up fox food) he then refuses to come back inside and tries to get a treat out of us first. If this is refused (as it normally is, when I am standing in the garden in wellies and a nightie at 3am when it is -5) he then runs under the tree and into the ivy, and won't come out, but peers at me through the leaves until I wearily stagger into the kitchen looking for the smallest dog biscuit for bribery.

2      In the snow we had last week, he still smelled cat t*rd, no matter where it was or how many inches of snow it was under. He would simply shovel his nose into the snow and keep digging until the snow became brown - hey presto, TURD.  He also found some bread on the village pond which had frozen. He tried to walk on the ice to retrieve it, and I refused this. He then lay flat basset, sideways in the snow, head down on the ground.

3   He was obsessed by a piece of battered sausage that had been thrown into someone's garden, and spent many minutes crying that he could not get to it until being marched away as I turned blue.

4      He was pitifully obsessed by a piece of bread thrown inside the  Christmas tree enclosure on the local green.  The enclosure was, I thought, too close to the ground, so he wouldn't be able to break in. Wrong. The following morning he got in. I had to ask two men walking past to lift the enclosure while I dragged him out. The bread in the meantime had been eaten overnight, by a bird probably, much to his chagrin.

5      He attacked a bin on Tuesday that had the audacity to have a fish+chip paper inside, and dragged it out. I pulled the paper out of his  mouth and - like a christmas cracker, with him on the other end - it exploded into a cloud of chips and batter. I spent the next few minutes picking up all the scattered food while he darted around me, munching. Did I mention it was sleeting?

6      His new obsession is for frozen, mouldy goose eggs laid up on the green by the pond. They smell disgusting and he searches high and low for them. He found one last week, I pulled it from the back of his mouth, and the stagnant yolk broke all over my gloves. I obviously had to remove them and carry them home. This was made slightly worse by the fact that it was snowing heavily and about -5. 

I have made up a slide show of Morse's scavenging - it includes many bin raids, the christmas tree incident, the battered sausage, waiting at the pub and being mortified by the early closing one day of the post office.

http://tinyurl.com/yjecm9y

Becky, Morse and Pumbaa ATB


      
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