Imagine this scenario. A dog is playing with a squeaky toy in the living room. Dad walks in, sits on the couch, and places a plate with a cookie on the cushion beside him. Dad begins to scroll through endless TV options, ignoring said cookie. Suddenly he is broken from his scrolling trance, not by the dog or the cookie, but from a work text. Dad heads upstairs to the office, leaving the dog alone with the cookie. What would you do?

I would eat the cookie. Finders keepers, right? Besides, humans shouldn’t let food go to waste. A lesson that I am more than willing to teach them. But alas, I wasn’t the dog in the living room. I was already upstairs in the office with Mom. It was Asa faced with this decision.

Minutes pass, which turned into an hour. Eventually Mom and I come downstairs, at which point I immediately smell the cookie and run towards it. Rookie mistake. I accidentally draw Mom’s attention to the unattended cookie on a plate sitting on the couch. She removes it before I could claim it as my just dessert.

It is then that she realizes Asa, who is now foolishly jumping around squeaking his toy, was alone with the cookie. Were there more cookies on the plate? Did he eat some and leave one, because he always shares? Mom, with cookie plate in hand, rushes upstairs with Asa and myself in pursuit. Asa because he thought we were playing some sort of new game, and myself because I’m still holding out hope to eat that cookie. We burst into the office, and Dad proclaims, “Oh I forgot about my cookie! Thanks for bringing it!” After confirming that there was only one cookie, Mom examined it before handing it to Dad. Not even so much as a lick mark. Asa didn’t give in to temptation and eat the chocolate chip cookie!

Now here’s where the story gets even weirder. That evening when Mom and Dad sat down to dinner, Asa began hounding them for their broccoli. Seriously, he prefers broccoli over a cookie! And of course he got some as a reward for being such a good boy, ignoring the cookie earlier. What dog begs for broccoli? Asa is a good boy to a fault!