The Minnesota Farm Woman

Grandma’s chicken pie. Grilled beef tips with sweet potatoes. Sunday roaster with organic garden vegetables. Wild-caught salmon with brown rice. I know your mouth is watering right about now. Mine would be, too, if I didn’t know these were flavors of dog food and not on the menu of a fine restaurant or dinner at Mom’s. Barney the Chihuahua is as spoiled as can be and enjoys a variety of treats. His favorite is a chewy beef with oatmeal, apples and sweet potatoes or a plain smoked pig ear as big as his head. He likes wild and natural things as much as the next dog and although he has been known to eat a few disgusting…er…organic things found in the back yard, he prefers to roll in them. I have never been able to understand that if an owl drops one dead mouse somewhere over our 7 1/2 acres, Barney manages to find that one small mouse and roll in it during the ten seconds he is off his leash. Luckily, small Chihuahuas, even stinky ones, are fairly easy to bathe. Barney’s shampoo is scented with lavender, which might seem silly but smells much better than dead mouse, and since he sleeps with us, he might as well smell good. I purchase as much organic people food as possible, but don’t quite understand the organic pet food movement for animals that turn over the trash cans while you are away, eating last night’s dinner and Lord knows what else. The dog food companies are out doing themselves by making more exotic flavors such as Spring lamb with barley and grilled wild duck. My daughter, the City Girl, has two huge drooling overly friendly yellow labs who would probably love the wild duck flavor. When she and her husband first moved to Minnesota, they lived at a duck camp out in the middle of nowhere that was absolutely the perfect place for honeymooners, large dogs, and porcupines. One day, with company coming for dinner, she was busy cleaning the house when one of the “boys” did just what retrieving dogs do….he carried a long-dead duck in through the doggy door and plopped it in the middle of her couch. Bad boy. I don’t think she ever quite recovered from that one, and shortly after what the family refers to as “the duck incident”, they moved to town and have been living happily ever after. Whatever you feed them, whatever you bathe them in, remember this: Dogs are people, too. The dog food companies are counting on it.