50 Shades of Gross (or Adventures in Canine Cuisine)

I have gone to great lengths of grossness to keep my dog healthy, but there’s a reason why. When Lou Lou was a puppy, we saw Dr. Barbara Royal for acupuncture for Lou Lou’s incontinence. At her clinic, which was in those days located around the corner from us on Wells St., I met her dog Tundra who seemed at first glance not much older than Lou Lou. My mistake. Tundra was 15 at the time.

While Lou Lou lounged on a mat and did her best acupuncture impression of a pincushion, I hung on every word Dr. Royal had to say about exercise and nutrition. I figured if a dog that looked a bit like Lou Lou could live so long and in such good health, then heck, the good doctor probably knows what she’s talking about. Following Dr. Royal’s advice is how I found myself touching, sniffing and even tasting things that the mere thought of would make most people gag.

We’ll start with the switch to frozen raw food. Not a biggie. It comes frozen in a bag and looks like square hamburger patties. Depending on which protein it is, it most often tastes like gamey hamburger meat. Score on the Shades-of-Gross-Out (SGO) scale with 50 being maximum gross out and 0 being no gross out? Zero when frozen and maybe a 30 when the power goes out and it thaws in 98 degree heat in a closed freezer when you are out of town. Let’s face it, everything organic gets a little fragrant under those conditions.

Then there was our mild obsession with tripe. You know, as in animal tummies and intestines. Mmmmm. Green tripe (cow stomach/intestines) is a wonder food for some dogs that is also one of the most foul smelling things in its raw, unfrozen state. Dried tripe on the SGO scale earns a score of 15 due to its rather pungent smell, but once ingested, the smell is gone. Handling it kind of feels like dried mushrooms. Tastes like grassy leather. No biggie.

Canned tripe? That’s taking it up another level. I bought a few cans at Kriser’s and couldn’t wait to get home and bust out the can opener. This is where I’d like to suggest that we add a smell-o-meter rating to canned goods labels. As soon as I punctured the seal on the can and began to twist the can opener, a whoosh of fetid air shot straight up in my face. A lesser mortal would have fainted. I just started to breathe though my mouth and smugly reminded myself how I was the best dog mom EVER. By the time I got the tripe out of the can (I swear I can still tell which fork I used) and into Lou’s bowl, I was headed to the deck. I like to think of it as Lou Lou enjoying her meal al fresco. Taste it? Not so much. We slept that night with every window in the house open, nevermind that it was December in Chicago. SGO score= 40. I did eventually figure out that keeping the cans in the fridge helped, but not by much.

One would think that almost vomiting in your dog’s food bowl would cure me, but I was determined to feed her like an Olympic athlete. So when a girl in one of our therapy dog classes who shared my zeal for canine nutrition asked me if I wanted to go in on some fresh green tripe with her, I said yes. I should have politely declined, but I kind of had a girl crush on her. Her name was T and she was a beautiful, blond, blue-eyed, Polish nanny with a handsome lab. Chicago has a large concentration of Polish people, and I’m pretty sure T must have been connected to what I liked to call the Magic Polish Network, which could make amazing things happen when you were in dire need of something. I know this must be the case because who else would have a tripe hook-up at a purportedly halal butcher in the West Loop?

I drove since T didn’t have a car. What we picked up was a cold, double-bagged lump of brownish-greenish goo. I chickened out on helping her divide it. Her? Strong like ox. Me? Strong like stuffed animal. What she brought to class for us next week was 20 smaller bags of frozen tripe. She said I needed to thaw the tripe completely before giving it to Lou Lou. Fat chance. Lou Lou was going to learn to love the tripesicle. I did taste one teeny bit of frozen tripe. I would assign it the flavor profile of chewy-crunchy rotted grass clippings. Based on that and what my car smelled like for a week after we picked up our treasure, fresh tripe earns a 45 on the SGO scale.

Our next flirtation was with raw organ meats like hearts and livers. For someone who really liked anatomy and physiology classes, it was kind of fun to poke around and try to identify veins and ventricles and what-not; it’s not much different from handling any other raw animal protein. SGO score…a measly 5. I mean, if you can take the giblets and neck (also yummy to dogs) out of a whole chicken, then you can slap a chunk of beef heart in a bowl.

Let’s not forget treats. We try to stick to natural treats and by natural I mean smaller dried parts of animals, not Milk Bones. When someone new to the canine flock discovers what bully sticks really are, it tickles me. The expression on a person’s face as she processes the concept of Fido going to town on a dried bull penis is priceless. Add in tendon flossies, tracheas, smoked marrow bones, raw meaty bones, rolled salmon skins, dried sardines, antlers…you get the picture. Lou Lou enjoyed nose-to-tail eating before it was all the rage. Until today, I was pretty sure that we had seen and eaten it all. Ha.

While hanging with my friend C and shopping at Dog Krazy in Fredericksburg, VA (one of my all time favorite stores on earth, more on them later), I was chatting with Dana and relaying how we were feeding cooling foods on the TCVM scale due to Lou Lou’s allergies. She pointed out something I had never seen before. Dried rabbit ears and feet, with.the.fur.still.on. She promised me Lou Lou would love them, so I put a few in our bucket along with some dried duck feet and milled around the store, sniffing them (no real detectable scent to me) and petting the fur while I tried to wrap my head around feeding parts of the Easter Bunny to my dog. What? You need a visual? I’m happy to oblige you.

Nose to Tail, Canine Style

The jury is still out on this doggy delicacy’s SGO rating, but I did give her one after dinner. Suffice it to say that watching your dog eat something that still has fur on it is the closest thing we’ve ever had to a Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom moment at our house.