Will and Won’t

Things my dog will eat, if given the chance:

Grapefruit
Vegetarian Sausage
Sticks
Dustbunnies
Tortilla Chips
Raw meat, including bones and organs
Whole eggs, sometimes including the shell
The feces of non-dog animals
His own hair and nail trimmings
Olive oil, straight
Butter
Sour Cream
Cheese
Tripe
Carrots, sweet potatoes, and a variety of vegetables
Random yard plants
Sardines

Things my dog will not eat, no matter how much I beg:

Conventionally farmed eggs
Supermarket meat that has been injected with saline
Hotdogs or pre-sliced lunchmeat of any kind

I have always considered tasting better to be kind of an accessory advantage to my own food politics. So I was a little flabbergasted the first time I gave Silas one of Mom’s supermarket-brand eggs. Silas adores eggs. He begs to lick the bowl when I’m scrambling them. But he could apparently tell that the supermarket egg was “not food.” And it isn’t like I always buy them straight from the hen; I buy everything from the cheapest free-range/non-organic that they sell at our “healthy” grocery store to the “real deal” at the farmer’s market.

We went through something similar when turkey started getting scarce and I had to buy him some from the regular grocery store. It was just not food. Not long after that, I got desperate and bought him very expensive turkey from the boutique vendor at the farmers’ market. He had never looked so happy about food in his life. And I was not imagining it–my husband, who neither knows nor cares what the dog eats at the day-to-day level, also noticed.

I don’t know what the moral is of this from the dog’s perspective. I certainly haven’t been buying Silas the boutique turkey; goodness knows I spend enough to feed him as-is. I’m fortunate that I don’t have to buy his food through regular grocers. Our raw-food supplier gets their food unprocessed enough for it to be added-sodium free, although I suspect it is all quite conventional in other ways.

But there is something now that niggles in my brain, when I look at something like a carton of cheap eggs, and it goes like this: “My dog, who thinks rabbit poop is delicious, does not think that egg is worth eating.”