2 weeks Ago
And so to this day, despite a penny having virtually no monetary value of any significance, I will still bend down (albeit slightly slower than I used to...
after all, you know you are a grown up when you groan when you get up) and pick up any penny that I happen upon, without hesitation. This now seems ridiculous, given that pennies are really only used now to give people change from something that costs £X.99, but old habits die hard.
And if I had a pound for every time someone said that...
But I digress. The other day I was passing some shops at lunchtime and saw, incredulously, that some school children were throwing coins at each other. Eventually they departed, leaving a plethora of pennies, two pennies and five penny pieces lying around.
I was quite amazed by their apparent philanthropy, but then the total quantity of money on the pavement wouldn’t even have bought me a packet of crisps. And that got me thinking. If you are a multi-millionaire, what value of money would actually prompt you to go to the effort of bending down and picking it up? A penny? A pound? A fifty pound note? Does whether or not you pick it up depend on your underlying character or on how much money you actually have? And what, I can hear you ask, has all this got to do with pets and vets? It is fairly simple really.
To humans, money is a resource, just as food and water is to an animal. It is to be worked for, fought for, guarded over, stored when there is an excess, and used wisely. Every single day at the surgery, I hear owners telling me how fussy their pet is over their food.
He will only eat chicken. She won’t eat any dry food. He doesn’t like salmon or duck, unless the former is smoked and the latter served with an orange sauce.
He will only eat turkey if it has gravy on it and the Brussel sprouts are pan sautéed. Okay. Perhaps I exaggerate a little.
But you get my drift. Almost invariably (because there are a few medical conditions that cause a poor appetite, even in skinny animals), the ‘fussy’ patients that are presented to me are poorly exercised, marginally (or very) overweight individuals who are quite simply eating for pleasure. To continue my analogy, their bank account is full and they have no inclination to take the trouble to stoop and consume a penny - and they will only eat when a high value note is flapped in front of their stodgy, podgy faces.
I think you can tell, therefore, what the answer is to their problem. Diminishing their ‘wealth’ by increasing spending in the form of exercise, while simultaneously slowing down the gravy train by reducing food portion size will soon have them bending for that penny. And that will be lucky for them, for sure.
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