dogs as omnivores

Penny is quite an adventurous eater, and willing to try new things.

Lately we've had lots of feijoas, courtesy of a friend with a huge crop on her tree, and Penny likes them.

I think perhaps she's willing to try many new foods because of having been offered a wide variety throughout her life. But she doesn't like celery!

In the back lane today, while I was contemplating the prolific crop of lilly pillies on a neighbour's tree, and wondering what I could cook with them, seeing they were just falling to the ground and rotting, Penny had wandered off towards our house. When I reached her, she had a big hamburger bun stuffed into her mouth. I got a bit suspicious that she wouldn't look up at me, and crouched down to look, and there it was. Such a trophy.

After a long battle of wills, in which I held onto the bun and repeated the command, 'Give!', she finally gave it to me. What a hard decision that must have been for her. I rewarded her with some yummy peanut butter treats from Ivory Coat. We got them from Deb at Bow Rei Me, when Penny had her Bowen therapy last week.

Another interesting treat Penny had this afternoon was a -hopefully very small - mouthful of fertiliser pellets, aka chicken poo. She was investigating a pot of wild rocket seedlings and, once again, wouldn't look up at me, always a tell-tale sign that she's pinched something she shouldn't. The dirt around her muzzle was another strong clue!

Now the plant is up high on a table.

I had a look in a book to see what I could cook with the lilly pillies, but it all seemed a bit too hard, so we're freezing them for the time being, and human number two might try them out as fabric dyes if we don't cook with them.

(The lilly pillies are in the plate at top right. There are some olives at top left. I'm experimenting with preserving them.)

the value of keeping a doggy diary

Penny's been eating grass. She has always used grass to settle her stomach, or to settle her gut, and it usually comes out the other end, all neatly folded and looking like it has passed through her digestive system untouched.

I've posted about it previously.

But this time she's had us worried, so much so that we went to the vet. She's been rushing outside not long after her meals, tearing at the grass like a sheep, and it's been coming through inside her faeces, so that at first we didn't realise it was there. (Now you know that we truly love her - who else would be pulling poo to pieces to see what's in it?) And then she vomited up a heap of grass.

So, to the vet...

He checked her thoroughly, asked if she's been well otherwise. Yes, she has. He listened to her gut for long enough that I started to get worried, and said it was noisier than usual. And I learned a new word when I read his notes - ascultation.

I mentioned to the vet that the first time we saw her rush outside, she had just been out in the garden chewing a three-day-old lamb shank she'd previously buried, and he said some dogs react badly to lamb. He then made sure her worming is up to date and suggested we monitor her for another couple of weeks, at the same time increasing the amount of roughage she gets.

I didn't think much of it until I came home and looked at the diary we keep:
Tuesday 24th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb, snacked on dug-up lamb shank;
Wednesday 25th January: breakfast - lamb and tripe canned food, dinner - not recorded;
Thursday 26th January: breakfast - lamb,dinner - Royal Canin Hypoallergenic dry food (rarely fed but we had some left over);
Friday 27th January: breakfast - beef, dinner - lamb;
Saturday 28th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb;
Sunday 29th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - lamb kidneys;
Monday 30th January: breakfast - lamb, dinner - canned lamb and tripe;
Tuesday 1st February: breakfast - lamb kidneys, dinner beef and canned lamb and tripe.

I said to a friend that we might not have twigged about how much lamb we were feeding if we didn't keep a diary, and she said, "What about plain old memory?"

Well, I must admit we feed such a variety usually that I wouldn't be able to recall exactly what Penny's had over the last week. By the way, there have been other ingredients to her meals, such as raw or cooked vegetables, Vets All Natural Complete Mix, Glyde, Melrose Omega-3 oil and healthy treats.

But lamb has accidentally dominated. And why?
Because it was on special in the supermarket and I love a bargain.
Because I happened to buy lamb as the canned food we sometimes feed (high quality ZiwiPeak, by the way).
Because I thought it would be good to mix in some organ meat and didn't stop to think that it was also lamb.

Once we became aware of this, we stopped the lamb, and she has only chewed on a little bit of grass once, that we know of. She's having more roughage than usual, as per the vet's suggestion (cold cooked potato and pumpkin, which she loves), and some rice and cooked chicken for the next couple of days.

Now the question is, should we let her have lamb in future?

My thought is that we overfed one food type, not that lamb per se is the problem. But we'll wait for a few weeks before reintroducing it.

However, I did come across this interesting snippet at K9Web in looking for information for this post:

Dogs are not allergic to a dog food per se, rather they react to one or more of the ingredients in the food. Some of the most common culprits are beef, pork, chicken, milk, whey, eggs, fish, corn, soy, wheat and preservatives. Many animals are now developing allergies to lamb as well. This was once thought to be very hypo-allergenic, but the more it is used, the more sensitivities are springing up.

It's been a lesson for us.

And I'm glad we keep a diary, even though our friends think we're weirdly obsessive.

dogs and asparagus

It's strange, but fortunate, that Penny doesn't eat the vegetables and fruit in our garden, even though she likes the occasional vegetable offcut in the kitchen. (Oh, she has taken to eating a couple of the fallen olives lately, but luckily they're in the front garden where she's not allowed, so she only gets to snatch one if she's out the front with us welcoming visitors.)

I'm growing lots of baby asparagus plants from seed and I know I'll have to wait about four more years before I can harvest them, but I got to wondering whether it would safe for Penny to nibble on them. I found some sites that say it is safe to feed asparagus. However, I've posted a question on Dr Renee's Roar Kingdom blog, because I'd like to confirm the information with a local vet.

One of the sites mentions the possibility that the dog's faeces might become green, and I'm sure glad to know that in advance, because we had a scare one time when Penny ate black dog biscuits and her poo turned blue.

Another site warns of 'bad odors in their dog’s gas or urine'.

Okay, we'll be prepared, when our asparagus comes up nice and lush - in three or four years!

On my other blog, I'm writing about the history of asparagus, and, guess what? It makes some human's urine smell stinky, also.

But the funny thing is that even though for more than two and half thousand years people have been writing about growing, cooking and eating this plant, no one ever wrote anything about this stinky effect until the seventeenth century.

dogs eating grass

Penny eats a little bit of grass most days - which I hope isn't a sign of an unsettled stomach - and sometimes I've thought she was having a nibble of a plant we call 'bamboo', even though it's not. It's arundo donax.

For a while we thought maybe she was licking drops of water off it.

























Well, yesterday I think I definitely saw her chew on it. And here's the photo I took:



In the past, I've seen her eat other types of grass, but I'm surprised that she would nibble on such a tough grass.