English springer spaniel Curtis may be blind and deaf, but he won’t let that stop him getting up to mischief.
Sadly, however, the 14-year-old dog has been caught in the act… on numerous occasions.
The elderly pooch has been captured on camera sneaking into the kitchen and stealing food from the countertops.
There’s evidence of him taking cakes, snatching an entire pan off the hob, and even nicking workmen’s lunches from their bags.
Over the course of 18 months, Curtis’s owner, Stuart Balshaw, 56, discovered clips of his pet’s naughtiness after checking the security cameras.
The final straw for Stuart was finding a licked-clean pan on the kitchen floor, with no trace of his homemade spaghetti bolognese.
Footage revealed that Curtis had woken up before 5am, sniffed out the meal, then jumped up and dragged the pan off the hob.
All this has earned him the title of a ‘ninja’ dog – and it’s especially impressive considering he’s both blind and deaf.
Stuart admits there’s no point being angry with the naughty mutt as he wouldn’t be able to hear them anyway so the family simply accept he is ‘untrainable’ and laugh at his antics instead.
Stuart, from Wokingham, Berkshire, said: ‘[Curtis] steals all the time. We’ve caught him a few times on the video camera.
‘We can’t relax at all in the kitchen when he’s around because he’s just constantly sniffing.
‘His trademark is his nose goes up like a periscope, he zones in on where he thinks the food is, then like a ninja he just jumps up and gets it. It’s gone before you know it.
‘If you leave anything on the side or cooker, like a dog biscuit, piece of cheese, ham, he zones in on it, finds it and eats it straight away.
‘There was one incident where we put three steaks out and suddenly there were just two.
‘We didn’t hear him or see him, and we were stood next to the steaks, but one of them was gone. Curtis was stood there licking his lips.
‘We’ve had builders here and they’ve put their bags down. He roots through them while they’re not looking and eats their sandwiches.
‘We’ve given up on the training after 12 years. He’s untrainable. Because he’s blind and deaf as well, he can’t hear anyone telling him off and can’t see that anyone might be watching him.’
Curtis first went blind in both eyes five years ago and was forced to have one eyeball removed after it became infected.
The rescue dog is also fully deaf, which Stuart claims leaves him ‘in his own world’ and focused entirely on sniffing out treats.
Stuart said: ‘We have years of memories where he’s eating all kinds of things. Constantly, every day, he’s up looking for food.
‘We’ve got [these] incidents recorded on the camera, but there’s loads of other incidents where we’ve been eating outside, and he’s nipped out from nowhere and taken a piece of cake from people’s plates.
‘Both incidents [with the pans] happened at about 5am. You can hear the crash.
‘Normally we’re just coming out of a sleep and come downstairs. By the time we get downstairs, the whole thing has been polished off.
‘It’s like he knows he has to eat it all before he gets caught.
‘We have a photo of him standing on the door of the dishwasher giving the plates a pre-wash. He’d managed to open the door of the dishwater and get in there with the plates.
‘You can’t be angry. He wouldn’t hear us anyway.
‘He’s in an ‘I don’t give a damn’ mode. He’s 14 – in dog years that’s probably 90-something.
‘He wanders around in his own world and his main focus is where his next meal is coming from.’
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