2 posts tagged “dog food”
O.k., that's it. I'm throwing in the towel, crying uncle, waving the white flag, giving up, capitulating. I'm not cooking dog food anymore.
Those of you who read my October 25 and October 30 posts know that I've been cooking my dogs' food for almost a month. And I've come to the conclusion that it's insane to keep doing it. Here's why:
Our freezer isn't big enough to store food for both dogs for even a single week, and ideally, to save time and labor, I'd like to fix two weeks' worth of food at a time.
To get around the freezer space problem, I decided to cook the meat and vegetables part of the meals separately from the rice. That way I could freeze the meat and veg, and cook the rice as needed. But that meant cooking rice every day and a half or so, and meat and veg every week, and remembering to defrost the next day's meat every morning, and keeping track of how the rice was holding up for each meal. Plus, since the dogs are different sizes, I had to remember how much rice and how much meat and veg each needed to eat at every meal. Should we ever go on a trip, I realized, I could never explain all this to the dog-sitter.
Ever since I started cooking for them, the dogs have been ravenously, constantly hungry. I've re-checked their protein intake and increased their rations to no effect. Two hours after a meal, they're famished, like me after dinner in a Chinese restaurant. And watching them patrol the kitchen for the smallest crumb, or inhale the seed hulls at the bottom of the bird feeder, or hearing them whine piteously when I start preparing their food has an unwholesome effect on my nerves. It makes me feel worried, unsettled and dispirited..
But I'm not going wholly back to kibble. I'll be supplementing it with vegetables, eggs, meat, powdered milk, canned fish—whatever comes to hand and seems healthy.
I'll be happier, and so will Lexi and Wolfie, for dog does not live by bread alone, but also by the feeling of easy communion with a non-frazzled mistress.
November 1, 2008
I can “hear” Wolfie and Lexi saying it all day long. But I'm starting to grow inured to their pleas. I'm feeding them four and a half pounds of food every day, for crying out loud. How can they still be hungry?
This afternoon I took them out, one at a time, to work and exercise them, but first I let them watch me fill the treat pouch with pieces of mozzarella and tie it around my waist. Wolfie did some nice stays and recalls and was delighted with the cheese rewards. Then I brought out the ball thrower, which he is addicted to, and made him stay while I waved the thrower around. He was o.k. with that. I ratcheted up the challenge by actually throwing the ball past him, and he held his stay. But when I tried to reward his self control with a bit of cheese, all he cared about was the BALL! He wanted to CHASE THE BALL!!! That's why he'd done all that silly stuff I'd asked of him, so he COULD CHASE THE BALL!!!! It was clear that even the ripest Camembert would not have distracted him, so I put the cheese away and let him have a rip-roaring session of chasing THE BALL!!
(As I threw balls for him with all my might, I remembered, two years ago, with the snow deep outside, locking myself in our guest room with eight-week-old Wolfie and a little ball. I would throw the ball and he would toddle after it, but would get distracted by the fringe on the rug. Eventually he'd remember the ball, start to bring it to me, drop it, go after the fringe again, find the ball, chew on it a while...tempus fugit.)
Then it was Lexi's turn to work. This is a dog who's been through years of obedience training, and has all her commands down pat. But she was so focused on cheese, the presence of cheese, the possibility of cheese, that when I put her on sit/stay and walked away in order to do a recall, she kept getting up and following me. It was as if there were a string from her nose to the cheese, and she couldn't not follow it. It took a few tries, but eventually she recalled what recalls were all about, and ran to me to snatch her reward, almost taking off my fingers as she did so.
The dogs have just had their dinner, and are lying down, momentarily sated. In half an hour, though, they'll be thinking about food again, like this:
