Evolving the doggy diet
Getting older confers certain rights. The right to bore our children with stories about how it used to be: “Why, son, they used to sell slide rules in the school store, right beside scribblers”. Or, as children react: “Huh?” I’ve ready to extend that right to family pets.
If my dog in listening (he always listens…), there was a time when dogs chewed on bones. Real bones, cut by the butcher from the shank of a bull. The kind of bones that a dog could bury, and later retrieve for continued pleasure. Not any more.
Instead, my dog can now draw upon a catalogue of hundreds of simili-products. Things that look like bones (and smell like bones, sort of). Things that look like an artist’s rendition of a bone. Things made from refined hide (as opposed to leather), that dissolve into an offwhite slush. Things that look like a shoe, although this incentive to destroy valuable footwear is probably a sideline for the shoe store.
Let’s move along to food. Again, my hound, the idea that you will be satisfied with pellets of processed potato peel is not a credit to your canine ancestry. You are slowing being drawn into some sick vegan trap. Revolt! Claim your share of the scraps from the master’s table. After all, that’s why you joined the household!
A trip to the local pet food store (again, who saw that specialty evolving?) is a trip down aisles of colour coded bags, running 20 Kg a toss, filled with something that is about as far from real pet food as we’re likely to get. I feel sorry for my furry friend; he may never know the pleasure of a stolen roast of beef.
