Ben is officially grounded for the next few weeks. We are confining him to the house with only supervised potty breaks and supervised outdoor time.
You may be wondering why he's lost his outside privileges. I have one word for you: dirt. The dog can't stop eating dirt.
Ben has always eaten everything, including occasionally munching on potting soil (always the store-bought kind) from our planters. But recently the combination of digging up the area for a patio behind our house and doing some grading around the foundation to improve drainage has proved too much for him. Ben has developed a taste for plain old red Virginia clay.
It may surprise you, but eating dirt all the time doesn't do good things to Ben's digestive system. Specifically, it does bad things to his digestive system that result in messy floors EVERY SINGLE morning. Yuck.
I hear it takes three weeks to form a new habit--I'm hoping it will only take three weeks of supervised potty breaks to form a new habit of not eating dirt. Silly dog.
P.S. FYI, I'm aware that new tastes for the inedible can be a sign of worms or dietary insufficiency so we're exploring those avenues, too, though with Ben's shiny coat and having never contracted worms in all these years of eating nastiness, I'd be surprised if those were the culprit.
