They're both still lean and lanky little mites. This, despite their astonishingly prodigious appetites. When Button and Riley were puppies it took desperate wile to encourage them to eat their meals. And even then they ate sparingly, though with infinitely more gusto when treats were added to their diet. They loved vegetables and for the most part little salads comprised their evening desserts once the main portion of their meal was consumed. In the morning, tiny bits of shredded cheese sprinkled over their meal encouraged their appetites.

With these two puppies, Jack and Jill of excitable temperament, albeit calm interludes, no amount of food offered them commensurate with their stage in life and breed seems enough to satisfy them; they appear never satiated. Their portions are far larger than anything we ever attempted to feed Button and Riley with their picky attitudes to food. Jack and Jill will eat just about anything. And they do indeed eat just about anything.

Their rapacious appetite leads to utter distraction. When they're taken out to the backyard at regular intervals the need to evacuate takes second place to foraging. Even dead spruce needles that the wind sprinkles all over the backyard -- and inclusive of small pieces of living spruce with the needles still intact on the minuscule branches that hold them -- are fodder for their appetite.

Jack has the slight edge on Jill as far as height goes, but she has the advantage in weight, and it's more than slight, although she is still lean enough so that her spine feels sharp under our fingers as do her ribs. She's better adjusted than he is when we're on the ravine trails, looking about her with interest, while he is absorbed with scoping out any potential bits of edible detritus. And to him any detritus is edible with the exception of long pine needles, long dead.

We just wonder whether the habit of the breeder to leave bowls of kibble out continually rather than use any particular feeding schedule, added to the fierce competition that exists between the twins, represents the core of the problem, as we see it. When we first brought them home they were utterly frantic to get at their food bowls at meal time. And they still are, but not to the same degree.

And the incredible rate at which they whoosh down their food has marginally decreased as our relationship progresses. Since they're still very much in their puppy learning stages we hope that the assurances related to the discipline of on-time meals of ample dimensions will gradually wean them off their immediacy of consumption, leading them to a calmer state of expectation.