last time I caught her doing it, I just gave her another spoon - one for the
dogs, one for her. We always have to adjust her portion sizes to include the
dogs...  or sometimes, depending what it is,  I'll give her a plate for her,
and a side plate of "that's for the dogs"   REALLY annoys me that one of the
dogs has developed a taste for her Ensure ... he (used to) know better than
to touch anything on the coffee table... now he helps himself when he thinks
I'm not looking.... SHE'LL actually move the cup towards him so that he can
get at it better... Damn stuff is too expensive to be dog food, hygiene
aside.

had taken to inviting him to sit beside her on the couch when she eats in
the living room... another major no no ... he lays with his nose at the edge
of her plate... doesn't do that any more though cuz she hates it when I
yell.... and I HAVE ~yelled~ at him to get down and lay down enough times
that she's stopped. Doesn't want him to get ~in trouble~     Not really nice
to yell at the dog, since she's the one that's encouraged the stupid thing,
but it's better than yelling at her, anyway.

Ah, here's my dog back... she's a little brat... MIL keeps forgetting that
the dog isn't supposed to be outside lose, and lets her out to "go meet mom"
... she (the dog) takes advantage of it.... comes back within a few minutes
though.

My MIL says the dog tells her things too ..... on one memorable occassion,
she yelled at him and called him an "ignorant little b**stard" because she
had repeatedly asked him a question ....  as in "Fine, don't answer me then!
Ignorant little b**stard!"  LMAO

The have this ongoing thing where she asks him if he wants to go out... the
answer is almost invariably no - he backs away, hides under my legs,
whatever (he's a big ol' suck...doesn't like snow, rain, cold, etc) .... she
acts as if he 'said yes' and opens the door anyway, then gets mad when he
'changes his mind'  LOL Gives her something to do though... some days they
go through the whole thing like 100 times.

My mother in law did exactly the same thing with her chihuahua.   She fed it
from her spoon or fork, from her own plate, whether it wanted to eat or not.
She would force it.   It would drink from her coffee cup then she'd drink
from the same cup.

It was utterly disgusting and my husband was in a black rage about it half
the time, but he knew she was attached to it and didn't want to make a fuss.
What was even worse, was that she would take a mouthfull of food, chew it,
then remove it from her mouth and place it in the dogs mouth.  (it had no
teeth, so she even chewed for it).   This went on at every meal and it was
absolutely nauseating.

The poor thing wasn't even allowed out of her clutches long enough to get a
drink of water or to defecate.    Finally at 3AM it would get free of her
death grip on it, and it would begin to yap yap yap, waking us all up, and
we'd find the it had gone all over the floor.

We tried "managing" the situation, but it was totally out of hand.   I would
try and feed the dog with our dogs, take it out when we took our dogs out,
but her force feeding it and just the whole lifestyle thing, coupled with it
going all over our house, finally just put my husband over the edge.   The
dog was almost 18 years old anyway, and it was "time."

Strange to say, about two years prior to her diagnosis, my mother in law had
intended to put it to sleep because it was old, toothless, unwell, and would
go all over her house all the time.   She was finding it harder to keep up
with, and her friends convinced her to put it down.

In the process of taking it to the vet's office in a grocery cart, somehow
she fell on the ice and got a small cut on her head.   She took this as a
"sign from god" that she shouldn't put the dog to sleep.

So she let the dog continue to use her whole house as a toilet for the next
couple of years.   She got many thousands less for the house than it should
have been, because of it.   The carpets were completely rotted through right
down to the wood.   The many years of dog urine had soaked into the wood
floors and the odor was impossible to get rid of.

So when she came to us, the dog of course wasn't any better, and it
continued using our house for a toilet too.   My husband wasn't going to
stand for it, and no matter what, we couldn't care for both her and the dog
too.   (If she had instead gone to a nursing home, the dog wasn't going to
be going along with her in either case).   So he took it one morning and had
it quietly and humanely put down and had the remains cremated.

She never stopped asking for that dog, a million times a day, even though we
got a new kitten and a new puppy since then in the hopes she would
"connect".    We had a doggie "funeral" for it, burying the ashes in a
lovely little special garden in our yard, planting bleeding hearts above it,
but she never remembered any of that.  In her mind that dog is still alive
and just out of her reach, hiding from her somewhere.   Only recently has
the dog obsession calmed down.

The brighter side of it all, is that after that she was able to remain with
us, and she has had a very good quality of life for her last few somewhat
cognizant years.   She has been with her one and only child and has had a
better life experience overall, than she has had in many a year beforehand.

She has been clean, well dressed, well fed, properly taken care of medically
and in every other way.   She has been treated with dignity respect and
love.  She has been stimulated by going to daycare, doing crafts, being
entertained there by the various programs, has had excellent exposure to
people, animals and children, seen her son, grandchild and great grandchild
more often, and I do believe she has declined at a much slower rate because
of having been here.