Saturday, February 4, 2012

A Dog's Dinner

By Owen Jones


What goes to make a dog's dinner? The phrase implies a mess, but most dogs' dinners these days look quite appetizing - a bowl of pleasant-smelling biscuits or half a tin of something that looks like cold meat pie filling.

It all appears very nice to us humans. And that is the whole purpose - dog food is sold to humans on its looks and smell.

We don't really know what the dog thinks of it. We only know that they wolf it down, but then so would you if you were hungry and you knew that the chance was that that was all you would get offered.

The fact is that a dog will consume almost anything if there is enough sugar or and salt in it. I had a collie-cross that would eat anything I gave her except Brussels sprouts (she would take them politely and throw them around, but she would not eat them).

It stands to reason that you cannot get a can of decent pie filling for a dollar, so whatever is in there will not be best beef. Yet it has to be fit for human consumption, so what is it? Well, to begin with, the gravy is probably made of carcass scrapings and blood, thickened with flour.

That would make it quite nourishing, but not as appetizing as it looks. The 'lumps of meat' are probably not meat. They are most probably offal and soy or something comparable. Again, not a bad thing, but not what it is intended to look like to us and the dog will absolutely know that it is not meat.

So what ought to constitute a dog's dinner? In the wild, a pack of wolves would bring down, say, a deer and rip its stomach open. The contents thereof are the first course. Since wolves by and large eat vegetarian animals, the stomach contents will usually include grass, leaves and other plants.

Then they will move on to the internal organs like heart and liver. The stomach and organs are the best bits and only the top dogs get them. When they are gone, they rip the carcass apart and devour the meat. Later they chew on the bones.

Those are the guiding principles for concocting a dog's dinner. if you cook your own dinner, cook a bit extra for the dog. Liquidize the vegetables to replicate the chewed food that would be in the deer's stomach. Most good butchers will have 'pets' mince' or a mixture that they use for producing faggpts (meatballs).

This pet mince normally contains off-cuts, offal and bits of internal organs, some skin, stomach lining and arteries - all the bits they could not sell to their modern customers. That takes care of the dog's natural second and third courses.

The butcher will also set some bones aside for his best customers, which you will be if you purchase your own and your dog's food there. Feed the meat raw mixed with the liquidized vegetables. Add an egg and some dry porridge oats to bind it all and provide fibre and you have the perfect dog's dinner.

This type of meal will vary naturally because you do not eat the same vegetables each day. You could add an apple or other fruit and celery is good too.




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