Little Dog on the Prairie

I know dogs are considered carnivores. But our dogs, Jada, an 8-year-old Australian Shepherd, and Yogi, a 9-month-old Schnoodle (don’t you dare say “mutt”), didn’t get the memo. This morning I was making Thai peanut-ginger sauce and chopping veggies for a spring pasta salad, and Yogi begged, literally sat up and begged, for red pepper.

Jada spent her first year or two on the trendy RFB diet (raw food & bones). Because I got tired of grinding up 40-pound boxes of chicken wings, necks, and gizzards, slopping them together with pulverized raw veggies, then freezing the resulting goo in billions of baggies, we switched her in her second year to Dick Van Patten’s New Balance kibble (didn’t you wonder what happened to Van Patten after Eight is Enough?). It’s made with organic meat, brown rice and veggies, with no meat meals or by-products (slaughterhouse floor sweepings). Maybe because of her wolf-like raw meat beginning, Jada’s pickier; she likes raw broccoli but snubs red, white, or orange veggies.

Yogi’s grown up on New Balance. He’s been known to snack on peacock poo. He’s dragged possums into the yard and might have sampled those, too, if we hadn’t rescued the poor catatonic things. He’ll eat pine needles and cardboard. Yogi likes all raw veggies except carrots and celery. He adores red pepper. Both dogs positively swoon for snow peas.

Maybe all dogs in the wild are opportunistic omnivores—the raw food gurus swear that wolves and wild dogs will eat anything except grains. I think it’s just that Jada & Yogi are South Dakota farm dogs who adapt to the sparseness of winter and the sudden abundance of spring by eating dang near anything. (On a side note, Stella Faye, our African Grey parrot, will ask—in English—for chicken. I try not to think about the implications of that.) So I will plant red peppers and snow peas in the garden this year, and we will all feast like the hounds we are.