Turning your pooch into a gourmutt
Why canine haute cuisine may not be as crazy as it sounds
As I write this, my 12-week-old Dandie Dinmont puppy, Gracie, is pursuing a blueberry across the kitchen floor as though her tiny life depends on it.
Not for her, her historical purpose of chasing foxes and badgers. She’s fine with organic fruit and tweed blankets, thank you.
She’s part of a new, got-to-be-gourmutt trend.
Watch out, because if it hasn’t happened already, canine cleanliving is coming to a kennel near you. Lucky hounds are feasting on organic turkey, kale and quinoa. They lap up rich stock — sorry, bone broth — as an amuse bouche and tuck into frozen coconut oil and raspberry “pupsicles” to cool them down on hot days.
But what am I saying, kennel? Dogs, even mightily beloved ones, used to live outside in kennels, but that is almost unheard of now.
Today, our dogs are not only in the house, the chances are they are cosying up on our sofas or, gasp, on our beds, too.
Today, we live in a world of no dog left behind. They go everywhere with us.
My local gastropub has an advertisement in the window for bar staff: “Good with dogs” is now in the job description.
When I began to cook for my own dogs, it was my guilty secret. I felt ridiculous, but I cook for everyone I care for — so why not them, too?
When I mentioned my fromscratch dogs’ dinners to my regular dog-walking posse, it felt like soothing group therapy.
Everybody was doing it — just nobody talked about it. Someone has to go first. I tentatively wrote a piece about cooking for Barney, my 10-year-old border terrier.
I felt relieved, unburdened. And then something odd happened. I did several radio interviews about it and then a British daytime TV show called to check Barney’s availability.
A posh cooking school invited me to teach a class (one woman came who didn’t even have a dog).
A publisher asked me to write a book about cooking for your dog.
As I worked on the recipes for my book, I began to see my own forays into canine haute cuisine as simply an extension of how we all used to feed our dogs anyway, with scraps from the table boosted with raw bones and the odd bit of tripe from the butcher.
Those dogs of yore all seemed to live for ages, without many of the intolerances and other foodrelated problems we see in some dogs now.
But many vets are wary of this new-old go-it-alone approach to dog nutrition.
Of course, there are concerns if people are feeding their pets wildly unsuitable things, or imposing wacky, self-indulgent vegetarian or even vegan diets on their pets. But many vets now have strong financial ties to large-scale pet food manufacturers, so unless you have a vet who has a genuine interest in canine nutrition, you’re not necessarily getting the most unbiased advice anyway.
In the spirit of gastronomic adventure, I did try to introduce Barney to the joys of the attractively named BARF (bones and raw food) diet, but it wasn’t for him.
His interest in meaty bones extends to burying them in the garden and then waiting for weeks until they achieve the perfect level of revolting before reappearing with them, gleefully, in the house.
And then there was the bone about which we do not speak.
A rather grand woman once came to measure a sofa, which was in need of reupholstering.
As she removed the cushions, she gingerly produced between her manicured fingers an ancient lamb leg bone.
“I think this belongs to him,” she said, witheringly.
She seemed the type who would disapprove of pets on the furniture at all, let alone burying their dinner down the back of it.
Now Barney enjoys a diet of around 60 to 70 per cent lean meat, boosted with vegetables, fruit, some grains, eggs, a little live yogurt and powdered egg shells for extra calcium and he seems disgustingly healthy.
As I began to work out how best to feed him, I got some hugely reassuring advice from Louise Glazebrook, a dog behaviourist and trainer in the U.K.
She reminded me that we send people home from hospitals every day and expect them successfully to feed babies, so it’s probably not beyond our capabilities to work out how to feed our pets too.
When I don’t have time to make my own dogs’ dinners, I rely on bought stuff as near as possible to what I’d create myself. It seems I’m not alone.
Gourmet pet food is flourishing. So it’s definitely a great time to be a dog.
One final confession: In our house, at least, the tables have been turned.
Many of the casserole recipes I develop for my dogs, I then tweak with extra seasonings to make them suitable for me and my husband.
So in truth, we now survive and thrive on the scraps from their table, and I’m here to report my coat’s never been more glossy.