Howl

by Bark Editors

  I had no idea how much dogs made as sitcom sidekicks, or from commercial residuals, but I figured it was enough to make sure Jeff and I could pay all our bills and maybe take a vacation that didn’t involve sleeping in his mom’s trailer in Fresno. As for Oscar, I doubted he would find the work too taxing. He lives to meet, sniff, and charm new people, so show business would be heaven to him. Plus, he wouldn’t grow up and sue Jeff and me for all his earnings that we’d spent on rent. If we allotted a certain percentage of his monthly take to all-natural dried-liver treats and plush hedgehogs, that would be plenty to keep him happy.

  It’s not as if I was spending all my time thinking about how to make my dog famous. It’s more like, after a long day of work, when I was standing on the sidewalk listening to yet another person squeal over him and ask me a familiar series of questions—yes, he’s a Frenchie; two years old; from a breeder in the Central Valley; yes, his ears are naturally like that; no, he doesn’t have too many health problems, unless you count excessive flatulence—it seemed like only a matter of time before we ran into the person whose questions could actually change our fortunes.

  So I wasn’t all that surprised the day Jeff came home from the park and announced that he had met a commercial director who had flipped over Oscar and said he would be perfect for a project she was scouting. It was all falling into place: the recognition, the jobs, the extra income from someone who almost wasn’t even working. Sure, maybe one of us would have to take a little time off work now and then to escort Oscar to auditions, grooming sessions, and cast parties. Maybe we’d even have to move to L.A. for a while. But it would be worth it.

  Or it would have been. “I’m going to call her tomorrow,” I said to Jeff. “Can you give me the card?”

  But my husband, chronic leaver of jackets, umbrellas, and ephemera, had managed to lose the director’s card somewhere in the eight blocks between the park and our apartment. Some fruitless searches through jeans pockets and bags followed, but that was that. My stubby, pet-quality dog had a moment of almost-fame, a nugget of recognition that could have avalanched into a gold mine of glory, fortune, exotic locations, and squeaky toys, and now it was over.

  Naturally, I never forgave Jeff. Several months after he lost the director’s card, French Bulldogs were storming the media. Here was one selling savings plans for a bank. There was one sheepishly demonstrating the need for room freshener. A particularly ugly—probably show-quality—one showed up in the new Steve Martin–Queen Latifah comedy. They sold MP3 players, illustrated computer-graphics capabilities, lounged alongside models in fashion spreads. And none of them was Oscar.

  Oscar likes to watch TV with me, and each time one of these impostors flickers by, I remind him, “That could have been you, dude. That should have been you. We should be watching this TV from Topanga Canyon.” He just blinks at me, but Jeff leaves the room every time.

  [Editors’ Note]

  Most dogs are indiscriminately enthusiastic about their meals. We who dish out the food, however, are often more curious. Holding up a spoonful of commercial dog food, we may wonder: What’s actually in this stuff and how might it taste? These next two essays, one written in 1989 by Ann Hodgman—before the advent of “gourmandized” dog food—and the other in 2006 by Rebecca Rose Jacobs (with a nod to Hodgman’s “analysis”), get to the heart of the matter. Affirming, perhaps, that nothing says lovin’ like something from your own oven!

  No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch

  The intrepid author experiments with dog food, so you—thank goodness—don’t have to.

  [Ann Hodgman]

  I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED about dog food. Is a Gainesburger really like a hamburger? Can you fry it? Does dog food “cheese” taste like real cheese? Does Gravy Train actually make gravy in a dog’s bowl, or is that brown liquid just dissolved crumbs? And what exactly are by-products?

  Having spent the better part of a week eating dog food, I’m sorry to say that I now know the answers to these questions. While my Dachshund, Shortie, watched in agonies of yearning, I gagged my way through can after can of stinky, white-flecked mush and bag after bag of stinky, fat-drenched nuggets. And now I understand exactly why Shortie’s breath is so bad.

  Of course, Gainesburgers are neither mush nor nuggets. They are, rather, a miracle of beauty and packaging—or at least that’s what I thought when I was little. I used to beg my mother to get them for our dogs, but she always said they were too expensive. When I finally bought a box of cheese-flavored Gainesburgers—after twenty years of longing—I felt deliciously wicked.

  “Dogs love real beef,” the back of the box proclaimed proudly. “That’s why Gainesburgers is the only beef burger for dogs with real beef and no meat by-products!” The copy was accurate: meat by-products did not appear in the list of ingredients. Poultry by-products did, though—right there next to preserved animal fat.

  One Purina spokesman told me that poultry by-products consist of necks, intestines, undeveloped eggs, and other “carcass remnants,” but not feathers, heads, or feet. When I told him I’d been eating dog food, he said, “Oh, you’re kidding! Oh, no!” (I came to share his alarm when, weeks later, a second Purina spokesman said that Gainesburgers do contain poultry heads and feet—but not undeveloped eggs.)

  Up close, my Gainesburger didn’t much resemble chopped beef. Rather, it looked—and felt—like a single long, extruded piece of redness that had been chopped into segments and formed into a patty. You could make one at home if you had a Play-Doh Fun Factory.

  I turned on the skillet. While I waited for it to heat up I pulled out a shred of cheese-colored material and palpated it. Again, like Play-Doh, it was quite malleable. I made a little cheese bird out of it; then I counted to three and ate the bird.

  There was a horrifying rush of cheddar taste, followed immediately by the dull tang of soybean flour—the main ingredient in Gainesburgers. Next I tried a piece of red extrusion. The main difference between the meat-flavored and cheese-flavored extrusions is one of texture. The “cheese” chews like fresh Play-Doh, whereas the “meat” chews like Play-Doh that’s been sitting out on the rug for a couple of hours.

  Frying only turned the Gainesburger black. There was no melting, no sizzling, no warm meat smells. A cherished childhood illusion was gone. I flipped the patty into the sink, where it immediately began leaking rivulets of red dye.

  As alarming as the Gainesburgers were, their soy meal began to seem like an old friend when the time came to try some canned dog foods. I decided to try the Cycle foods first. When I opened them, I thought about how rarely I use can openers these days, and I was suddenly visited by a long-forgotten sensation of can-opener distaste. This is the kind of unsavory place can openers spend their time when you’re not watching! Every time you open a can of, say, Italian plum tomatoes, you infect them with invisible particles of by-product.

  I had been expecting to see the usual homogeneous scrapple inside, but each can of Cycle was packed with smooth, round, oily nuggets. As if someone at Gaines had been tipped off that a human would be tasting the stuff, the four Cycles really were different from one another. Cycle-1, for puppies, is wet and soyish. Cycle-2, for adults, glistens nastily with fat, but it’s passably edible—a lot like some canned Swedish meatballs I once got in a care package at college. Cycle-3, the “lite” one, for fatties, had no specific flavor; it just tasted like dog food. But at least it didn’t make me fat.

  Cycle-4, for senior dogs, had the smallest nuggets. Maybe old dogs can’t open their mouths as wide. This kind was far sweeter than the other three Cycles—almost like baked beans. It was also the only one to contain “dried beef digest,” a mysterious substance that the Purina spokesman defined as “enzymes” and my dictionary defined as “the products of digestion.”

  Next on the menu was a can of Kal Kan Pedigree with Chunky Chicken. Chunky chicken? There were chunks in the can, certainly—big, purplish-brown chunks. I forked one chunk out (by now I was becoming callous) and found that whi
le it had no discernible chicken flavor, it wasn’t bad except for its texture—like meat loaf with ground-up chicken bones.

  In the world of canned dog food, a smooth consistency is a sign of low quality—lots of cereal. A lumpy, frightening, bloody, stringy horror is a sign of high quality—lots of meat. Nowhere in the world of wet dog foods was this demonstrated better than in the fanciest I tried—Kal Kan’s Pedigree Select Dinners. These came not in a can but in a tiny foil packet with a picture of an imperious Yorkie. When I pulled open the container, juice spurted all over my hand, and the first chunk I speared was trailing a long gray vein. I shrieked and went instead for a plain chunk, which I was able to swallow only after taking a break to read some suddenly fascinating office equipment catalogs. Once again, though, it tasted no more alarming than, say, canned hash.

  Still, how pleasant it was to turn to dry dog food! Gravy Train was the first I tried, and I’m happy to report that it really does make a “thick, rich, real beef gravy” when you mix it with water. Thick and rich, anyway. Except for a lingering rancid-fat flavor, the gravy wasn’t beefy, but since it tasted primarily like tap water, it wasn’t nauseating either.

  My poor Dachshund just gets plain old Purina Dog Chow, but Purina also makes a dry food called Butcher’s Blend that comes in Beef, Bacon & Chicken flavor. Here we see dog food’s arcane semiotics at its best: a red triangle with a T stamped into it is supposed to suggest beef; a tan curl, chicken; and a brown S, a piece of bacon. Only dogs understand these messages. But Butcher’s Blend does have an endearing slogan: “Great Meaty Tastes—without bothering the Butcher!” You know, I wanted to buy some meat, but I just couldn’t bring myself to bother the butcher.

  Purina O.N.E. (“Optimum Nutritional Effectiveness”) is targeted at people who are unlikely ever to worry about bothering a tradesperson. “We chose chicken as a primary ingredient in Purina O.N.E. for several reasonings [sic],” the long, long essay on the back of the bag announces. Chief among these reasonings, I’d guess, is the fact that chicken appeals to people who are—you know—like us. Although our dogs do nothing but spend eighteen-hour days alone in the apartment, we still want them to be premium dogs. We want them to cut down on red meat, too. We also want dog food that comes in a bag with an attractive design, a subtle typeface, and no kitschy pictures of slobbering Golden Retrievers.

  Besides that, we want a list of the nutritional benefits of our dog food—and we get it on O.N.E. One thing I especially like about this list is its constant references to a dog’s “hair coat,” as in “Beef tallow is good for the dog’s skin and hair coat.” (On the other hand, beef tallow merely provides palatability, while the dried beef digest in Cycle provides palatability enhancement.)

  I hate to say it, but O.N.E. was pretty palatable. Maybe that’s because it has about 100 percent more fat than, say, Butcher’s Blend. Or maybe I’d been duped by the packaging; that’s been known to happen before. As with people food, dog snacks taste much better than dog meals. They’re better looking too. Take Milk-Bone Flavor Snacks. The loving-hands-at-home prose describing each flavor is colorful; the writers practically choke on their own exuberance. Of bacon they say, “It’s so good, your dog will think it’s hot off the frying pan.” Of liver: “The only taste your dog wants more than liver—is even more liver!” Of poultry: “All those farm fresh flavors deliciously mixed in one biscuit. Your dog will bark with delight!” And of vegetable: “Gardens of taste! Specially blended to give your dog that vegetable flavor he wants—but can rarely get!”

  Well, I may be a sucker, but advertising this emphatic just doesn’t convince me. I lined up all seven flavors of Milk-Bone Flavor Snacks on the floor. Unless my dog’s palate is a lot more sensitive than mine—and considering that she steals dirty diapers out of the trash and eats them, I’m loath to think it is—she doesn’t detect any more difference in the seven flavors than I did when I tried them.

  I much preferred Bonz, the hard-baked, bone-shaped snack stuffed with simulated marrow. I liked the bone part, that is; it tasted almost exactly like the cornmeal it was made of. The mock marrow inside was a bit more problematic: in addition to looking like the sludge that collects in the treads of my running shoes, it was bursting with tiny hairs.

  I’m sure you have a few dog-food questions of your own. To save us time, I’ve answered them in advance.

  Are those little cans of Mighty Dog actually branded with the sizzling word BEEF, the way they show in the commercials?

  You should know by now that that kind of thing never happens.

  Does chicken-flavored dog food taste like chicken-flavored cat food?

  To my surprise, chicken cat food was actually a little better—more chickeny. It tasted like inferior canned pâté.

  Was there any dog food that you just couldn’t bring yourself to try?

  Alas, it was a can of Mighty Dog called Prime Entree with Bone Marrow. The meat was dark, dark brown, and it was surrounded by gelatin that was almost black. I knew I would die if I tasted it, so I put it outside for the raccoons.

  Leave Some for Me, Fido

  [Rebecca Rose Jacobs]

  ON THE WAY into my New York office earlier this summer, I stopped at my favorite bakery to pick up an iced coffee. I was feeling hungry after a short run, but didn’t fancy tackling one of the store’s signature “giant muffins.” Fortunately there was a jar of more manageable biscuits next to the till. These were small and plain. Just the thing. “An iced coffee, and one of those,” I said.

  The muffin man looked over the counter and examined the empty floor by my feet. “You do know those are for dogs?” Humiliated, I left the place with only a drink in hand. What kind of establishment puts dog treats in a glass bowl next to the till?

  In New York, many kinds of eateries do just that. As one who finds the sight of dog owners picking excrement off city streets vomit-inducing, I was not pleased to be sharing coffee-shop counter space with the neighborhood dogs.

  Eventually I realized I wasn’t upset at the thought of the dog biscuits contaminating the human fare. Heck, I’d wanted the dog food for myself. I was jealous—jealous of the dog’s healthier options, jealous of the prominent display, jealous generally of all the fuss made about man’s best friend. If the doggie tidbits on offer were good enough to eat, I decided to try them out.

  I was inspired by a classic essay by an owner who ate her dog’s food. Ann Hodgman’s “No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch,” written for Spy magazine in 1989, is now a favorite text in writing classes. In it, Hodgman tries the food she’s feeding her dog, from Milk-Bone Flavor Snacks to Kal Kan Pedigree chunky chicken. It offers a harrowing description of eating a can of meat containing a “long gray vein.”

  I started my adventure in the safety of a specialty dog food shop where the employees claimed to try all the food themselves. Indeed, their Fido Eats oatmeal cranberry dog biscuits contained nothing more unsavory than organic white flour, organic oatmeal, organic cornmeal, and cranberry juice (for fighting urinary tract infections, as the sleek, minimalist packaging explains). I popped one in my mouth, then another. They didn’t taste bad, although they also didn’t taste very strongly of cranberry. They were a little hard, I suppose, and, at about the size of a 5p coin, difficult to dip into my coffee. This is good for dogs, since hard food is what cleans their teeth.

  The only really distasteful aspect of the Fido Eats treats was the price: $18.99 for what couldn’t have been more than five ounces of food.

  Izzy Yum Yums’ Sushi Snacks for Dogs, at $19 for two rolls and eight pieces of sashimi, contain rice, seaweed, chicken broth, and, weirdly, Parmesan cheese and ham flavoring. It was also the one item I tried that I really couldn’t bite into for fear of cracking my teeth. The bits of uncooked rice I managed to gnaw off didn’t taste like fish, and a small mound of “wasabi,” which I could do little more than lick, seemed to be mostly sugar.

  Sugar is the one thing most treats avoid, perhaps because dogs can develop adult-onset diabetes from eating
too much of it, according to Pratikshya Patil, a vet at the New York Veterinary Hospital.

  So the Kung Fu Fido Fortune Cookies for Dogs (at $10) are infused with chicken livers, not sugar—not that I could have detected the difference. The cookies resemble those served at any Chinese restaurant. The only telling difference is the fortunes: “Someday you will find yourself barking up the right tree,” for example, or “Confucius say, dog who pee on electric fence get real zinger.”

  After a morning of eating organic oatmeal-cranberry dog crackers, followed by dog fortune cookies and a fairly tasty, if hard, carob-and-peanut-coated homemade dog biscuit, I felt glum. I had crossed a line drawn far back in evolutionary time, and while I was still hungry, human food now also felt diminished, like mere calories dressed up as dinner.

  Still, as demoralizing as my initial encounters had been, they did not approach the repulsive experiments Hodgman conducted. Maybe it is simply that all food—dog and human—marches ever upward, becoming more sophisticated, clean, and refined with each decade. After all, the 1960s recipe book Saucepans and the Single Girl, recently rereleased for the nostalgic and post-modernist among us, contains recipes for Humbleburger Soup and Sardines and Cream Cheese. I’m no gourmet, but I’d sooner serve my dinner guests dog food crackers than steaming bowls of burger soup. Mind you, in ten years, some other single gal living in a studio apartment in Brooklyn may choke at the thought of serving prosciutto-wrapped figs at a cocktail party.