You will never witness a facial expression more intense than a dog's when it's staring at food. Especially human food. If you carry a plate of sausages from kitchen to dinner table, a dog's solemn, unblinking eyes will follow you around the room, just like a creepy portrait painting in Scooby Doo.
Dogs are always entranced by the food-illuminating light in the refrigerator when you open the door; not by the miracle of electricity itself, of course, but by the wealth of edible objects it reveals. They gaze at the shelves of gleaming groceries with spellbound eyes and quivering noses. You can almost hear the tsunami of drool gushing through their gluttonous jaws.
Observing dogs in this fridge-hypnotized state, I'm often reminded of archaeologist Howard Carter peering into the golden tomb of Tutankhamun: 'Can you see anything?' Carter was asked. 'Yes, wonderful things,' he replied.
To be fair, the canine food pyramid is particularly dull and unappetizing. Compared to our multi-colored cornucopia, it's a shapeless lump of crumbly brown things with a thin stratum of rawhide. No wonder dogs obsess over our dinners when presented with such dreary rations in their own bowls.
For dogs, a fridge full of people food must indeed be a vision of mesmerizing treasures, especially the back of the fridge, where lurks a lifetime's supply of crumbs and blobs of lickable goo.
Alas, just as tomb-plundering Howard Carter was punished by an ancient Pharaoh's curse, so dogs are also struck down after stealing treasure from its rightful home, even if that treasure is only the remains of last night's shepherd's pie. For just as there is no facial expression more intense than a dog's when it's staring at food, there is none more pathetic than theirs when they are puking up that same food all over the floor.
