Jake - Black toy 1 yr old
Honey - Apricot toy - 9 yrs old
Henri - Cream Miniature - 2 yrs old
Fiz - Red toy - 2 1/2 yrs old
Well, I didn’t crawl into bed until 2.00 am this morning and here I sit practically brain dead.
The house reeks of tripe, for those of you who don’t know what tripe is I’ll try to explain. Imagine the smell of cow manure mixed with sheep manure and then throw some horse poop on the pile and you pretty much get the drift… I buy tripe in frozen patties and the dogs love it like cats love catnip. The smell drives them crazy and they become little ravenous pigs gobbling it up. Tripe is the contents of the cow’s stomach at slaughter and that might be disgusting for humans but it's the first thing a wild predator eats after the kill. Yum!
I feed my dogs homemade diet. Usually raw or semi cooked and bone. The optimum diet for a dog is 30% organ meat, 60% muscle meat and 10% bone. Dogs are carnivores and wheat is not conducive to their diets although the pet food manufactures seem to feel otherwise. Wheat and byproducts are fillers that don’t serve your dog in any way, shape or form. If you look inside a canine’s mouth you will see sharp teeth for tearing, ripping and crushing, taking down prey and stripping meat from bones. I try to feed my dogs a diet that closely relates what they would eat in the wild. Dogs are scavengers and will eat anything, including another animal’s dung, so although we think our dogs are above this sort of behavior, they’re really just an animal sharing our home. Of course I like to pretend my dogs are the exception to the rule, with above average intelligence and a semblance of culture; after all they dine off of Blue Willow China so elegantly. But then horror of horrors, they go outside, roll in deer poop just to burst my bubble.
We have four babies….I mean dogs. All poodles; three toys and one miniature. Honey, Fiz, Henri and Jake. The oldest is nine and the youngest just turned one. The nine year old doesn’t have one bit of plaque on her teeth, not a hint of discolouration whatsoever and she has never been to the vet for a cleaning. The secret? Bones. Real bones, at least twice a week. We are told not to feed our dogs bones but why? Vets will say that your dog could choke or get a bone shard in their colon. That would be sad but I am willing to take the chance to provide my dogs with an optimum diet. Bone dissolves in the animals gut, like chocolate melts in our hands. In goes bone and out comes a dry, powdery tube with very little smell. One person said it best. No coyote
ever died from eating a chicken, bones and all. You see it is the cooked bones to avoid, they become brittle and are more apt to splinter but a raw bone is a tough customer. My dogs will take a marrow bone and scrape the insides until the outside wall is wafer thin. Bones rub against
their teeth and gums and remove tarter buildup while supplying the necessary nutrients to their diets. My dogs are pros, can strip a bone of meat and sinew in minutes. I like to think if they ever found themselves in the wild, you know, if I had a massive heart attack outdoors in the middle of the night during their before bed pee and they wonder off into the woods, they would be able to hunt and know what to do with their kill. Morbid thoughts I know but it is something I think about being the daughter of a doomsayer, a worry wart who drummed in a potential death scenario for every moment of our childhood. He could have been famous if Hallmark had a need for an "all the bad things that kill you" section in their greeting card line. So, at times when it’s cold and dark out there I worry about my guys and how they would survive. Hopefully they would hang around and cuddle with me for warmth but maybe I’d be missing a nose when they find me.........
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