On Thursday I went to Guillory's and picked up some steaks. Guillory gets select beef and sells it at extremely attractive prices. When I was there, the help was taking a fresh batch of
pork cracklings out of the oil, so I got a sack of those too, as an
hors d'oeurve. While drinking cocktails with Milady as the grill heated, I broke out the cracklings and of course, the dog had to insert himself, begging pathetically for a morsel.
Pork does terrible things to his digestive tract, most notably resulting in what veterinarians call
scouring. All day Friday he was one sick puppy. Almost a caricature of a sick puppy. Yesterday, all he wanted to do was to lay on concrete and watch traffic.
He heard the shutter click and turned to look at me, as if to say, "Leave me alone, old man. Those cracklings almost murdered me."
Doesn't he look pathetic? He's recovering nicely, but I think that we've taken pork cracklings off his dietary list. We've learned that barbequed ribs are tough on his system as well.
Poor old dog. In another day or so he'll be fine and begging for treats once again.
2 comments:
What has happened with the breeding of our pet species? When I was young, everyone had dogs & cats which ate everything we ate, with no noticeable bad effect. Dogs ate Alpo and cats ate Friskies, neither of which were what we now call "balanced diets". Most folks' pets in the countryside existed by eating vermin, table scraps the hogs didn't get (note that in O R, you can't feed scraps to hogs any more) or very cheap pet food.
I had a cat 50 years ago, a Blue Point Siamese, which LIVED on cracklings. He lived for 15 years, too.
We loved our pets just as much as we do now, but we kept them for a lot less money then. Owning a pet today is an expensive proposition. Veterinary services cost almost as much as human doctors charge, and prescription diets can cost $150/month to feed a large dog with digestive troubles.
This is nuts. Until about 20 years ago when this pet "industry" sprang up to eat our paychecks, the only people who ever spent that level of money owned champion hunting dogs into which that had invested vast sums.
Gotta agree with Rivrdog... And glad the ol' dog is better!
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