Jan 28, 2025 – Andy is in ourLittleCorner today.

The Counter-Productive Advantages of Being a Cardigan Corgi

By all measures it shouldn’t have happened; but it did – big time – and more than once. It’s a convoluted story, but here’s the long and short of it: Wynn, our seemingly sweet, innocent little Cardigan Corgi is not what she appears to be. Allow me to elaborate.

To begin, Wikipedia tells us that “corgi” is derived from the Welsh “cor gi” which means “dwarf dog.” Cardigan Welsh Corgis were selectively bred over the centuries to have very short legs to enhance their herding abilities. Their short stature gives them excellent maneuverability plus keeps them low enough to the ground to avoid getting kicked by pissed-off cows. These Corgis also supposedly are adept at herding poultry and waterfowl (as well as baby possums, as you may recall from an earlier blog). Additionally, we are told that Corgis are versatile and can adapt to different environments.

That Wynn is versatile is evident in how she she has adapted to the environment of our kitchen and dining areas. It’s as if Wynn has rechanneled her instinctual herding energy to a relentless drive to forage for human foods. Evidence of this foraging drive came to our attention a while back when we returned from a shopping trip to discover on our floor a partially chewed empty bag that had been full of homemade hazelnut biscotti (with black pepper). Ann had just baked them (technically, double-baked them) and left them on our dining table prior to departing for the market. How could our short little Corgi manage to get that bag off the table and how could she have eaten so much!

I’m not sure how much a Corgi’s stomach can hold, but there is good reason to believe that, based just on what we know Wynn successfully has foraged in our house, their stomach capacity is quite substantial. Here are some examples of her foraging trophies:

• Two grilled hamburger patties from our kitchen countertop.
• One half of a 9-inch Pepitas and Chocolate Cake/Torte (find our recipe here) from our dining table (Note: chocolate is very bad for dogs).
• Unkown quantity of hazelnut biscotti (recipe published below) from our dining table.
• Several bully sticks (you don’t want to know what they’re made of) from our breakfast bar.
• About 1/4 loaf of Della Fattoria Pumpkin Seed Bread from the countertop.
• The better part of a bag of “Power Packed Jerky Treats” from the breakfast bar.

To help understand how Wynn has managed to pull off these capers I did some measuring. Because she is quite short when on all fours it’s easy to overlook the fact that her body length may allow her to get high enough to reach forbidden food. The measurements are presented below. Figure 1 shows Wynn’s body stats. Figure 2 provides the height of three of her most fertile foraging sites – our dining table, our kitchen countertop, and our breakfast bar counter top.

By all measures, the dining table is a foraging gimme for Wynn. Her body length alone is sufficient to get her high enough to hit pay dirt. The kitchen countertop, although 5 inches higher than the dining table, is still within her foraging reach. Indeed, I have hard evidence of this as you can see in the below photo from my trail cam that I set up in the kitchen. While up on her 7-inch hind legs her 30-inch body gets her a full two inches above the countertop. Goodbye to any food we leave near the edge!

But how has Wynn been able to pilfer from our 42-inch-high kitchen bar which is well above her extended 37-inch reach? Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to catch her in the act with my trail cam. But I suspect that one of her “adaptive” tricks is to make use of her bed that is under the breakfast bar. Her bed is 5 inches thick which could extend her 37-inch reach to 42 inches, the height of the breakfast bar countertop. I consider that to be pretty clever for a short dog bred to herd cows.

Although I am no evolutionary biologist, I do wonder if Wynn’s adaptation to foraging off the higher places in her kitchen environment may reflect Jean-Baptist Lamarck’s evolutionary theory and his explanation for why giraffes have such long necks. Brittanica.com offers this summary, “[A]s a giraffe stretches its neck to browse higher in trees, the continuation of the habit over an extended period results in a gradual lengthening of the limbs and neck.” Lamarck believed that such traits somehow got passed on to next generations.

Although Lemarck’s theory has been largely dismissed since the 1930s, I wonder if Wynn’s constant stretching for those crucial extra micro-inches to reach illusive morsels on countertops may gradually be stretching her body and even contributing to the next generation of non-herding , long-bodied Cardigan Corgis. Unfortunately for any remaining Larmarckists, Wynn has been spayed. With no progeny in her future there will be no way to verify this speculation.

Evolutionary theories aside, the trick now is for the humans who share their environment with a Corgi to be more clever than the Corgi and to keep food out of harm’s way. That’s a tall order.

And finally, because this is a food blog, I feel it’s appropriate to include the recipe for the Hazelnut Biscotti with Black Pepper that Wynn devoured. Although we don’t know what Wynn thought of them, Ann and I find these biscotti to be addictively good. Note: our photo had to be sourced from the web because Wynn ate all of the biscotti before we could take a picture.