Question du Jour #20

This, for authenticity's sake, is a photo of the event to which I will be referring below, but given the sensitivity of some readers (myself among them), perhaps it's better that my phone's camera didn't pick up enough light for a clear picture. I took a couple afterwards of the main characters that will help to illustrate. In this corner, weighing in at...hold on, I'm going to go weigh him...18.4 lbs (it was actually 16 when I weighed him, but Nick got worried that the pup had been crash-dieting and double-checked, and got 18.4 three times in a row), we have Graham, our little boy puppy. Wow, he's lost weight. Hey, Dr. Neuman, if you're reading, it worked! And in this [other] corner, weighing in at...shoot, I don't know, let's just say a couple of pounds, and definitely fewer than 18.4, we have a probably injured bird. The photo sort of tells the whole story in itself, but I'll fill in the details. When Nick and I had gone out for dinner earlier, there was a seriously chubbed-out pigeon-type character sitting in our courtyard. He was, in fact, so plump that I thought upon first glance that he had no head, when, really, he just had no neck. He was behaving in a rather unbirdlike fashion, which is to say that he didn't appear to have a 3-trillion-beats-per-minute heartrate and wasn't moving, and thus seemed as though he might be sick or injured.

Fast forward a few hours. I took the dogs out for their night walk, and as I sometimes do, let them off leash when we got back into the courtyard. Only too late did I notice that the bird was still there, after either just Graham or both he and Winnie had pounced--I'm not sure which because, like most public-space lighting in France, the light in the courtyard is on a timer and soon went out, leaving me in the dark with two small dogs and some short-lived flappy scuffling sounds. The bird's protests soon went silent, and when I got the light to go back on, Graham had it in his mouth. The bird, not the light. He looked at me, ready to head upstairs, as though there weren't a splay-winged, feathered creature locked between his jaws. I tried the old "leave it," which, on a good day, works with a bit of baguette he might scavenge in the street, but a whole bird? Forget it.

I yelled up for Nick, who heard me through the closed window (blast you, broken interphone) and came down with a rawhide bone, previously just about Graham's favorite thing ever. But that was B.B. (Before Bird), and this was a whole new ballgame. We had learned in long-ago puppy kindergarten class that in order to get your dog to drop something he has in his mouth, you just swap it out for something of higher value. He has a toy? Trade it out for a piece of cheese. Sadly, we were fresh out of live deer, and so what was our option? In fact, Graham was very interested in the bone, stared at us wide-eyed, wagged his tail, sat politely for his special treat, even ran after the bone when we threw it, but seemed to be missing that there was something in the way of his chewing on it. Something that, as we now saw all too well, did have a neck after all. Nick, in a feat of bravery (or maybe just imperviousness to yuck) that is way beyond me, grabbed for the bird at one point, but quickly came to his senses and got grossed-out. A guy who was in the courtyard on his cell phone sympathized with our plight, but mostly thought the whole thing was pretty funny. It was. Eventually, after much fruitless cajoling (and while Winnie chowed down on the bone he was ignoring), Graham dropped the bird to have a better look at it and I picked G up, while Nick went upstairs for a plastic bag and disposed of the bird in the common building trash. So, what I'm wondering is:

What would you do to get a dog to drop a yummy, yummy bird?