I recently had occasion to travel with the dog. There were two dogs the last time I wrote about dogs and feeding. One died of a fast moving tumor. This was awful, but he went fast with the assistance of the vet. The loss left us with the original family dog, a small brindle border terrier with bad breath and a goofy, independent personality.

    I needed to go to Edisto Island, a trip of many hours, and the dog, Glenner, was a good companion in many respects. While her conversation lacked interest she liked sitting or lying on the front seat, especially when there was convenience store jerky in the vicinity. She slept on the front floor and every so often went into the back seat and spent some time in her crate . Aside from the jerky, she didn’t get anything to eat on the drive down or back.  Not eating didn’t stop her from spicing up the trip with an every-now-and-then air poop or belch. Borders will eat anything; who knows what she was giving back. It may be that dogs are as omnivorous as people. The boarder terrier certainly seems to be.

    While we were on the island she enjoyed walking up and down a strange road, but being a NY dog she wasn’t used to the pollen load that acres of almost wilderness and heavy vegetation can produce. We would walk a few steps and she would do her usual NY dog deep inhale and start sneezing and gargling and snorting and sneezer clearing and then repeat the act a few paces down the road with a fresh load of new inhalations. I imagine that she will get the hang of it with a few more trips and the sound effects will diminish.

    When we passed a Costco in Charleston I bought her a package of beef stew meat. She got to eat way too much of it for a dog of her size – not a problem as far as she was concerned.  Dogs that eat meat make much smaller and less frequent poops. This is a good thing, I believe. Being a border terrier she doesn’t think that the four to five ounces that she gets once a day is anywhere near enough to support her fifteen pound self and one day she found a bag of dry food behind the kitchen door. The walk the next day was both productive and urgent.

    What’s this got to do with food?  Well, not a lot as far as people go, but raw meat is important to dogs and it makes most of them smell better. It certainly makes my dog smell better, but if you didn’t know her before she started her raw meat diet, you might not think so on meeting her. I read that green tripe makes a great dog food. I reason from there that deer tripe might also be beneficial and seeing as we have more deer on Edisto than Lapland has reindeer I intend, the next time I take a deer to the processor, to ask him to wash and save the tripe for the dog. I know that a gut pile left in the woods is almost always devoured within a day or two so it seems that animals like it well enough.

    I have been giving her a little dry food with her beef so as to keep her somewhat regular – roughage you know. She went through a phase a couple of weeks ago of eating the leaves from the tomato plants. I think, I hope, that’s over. The leaves make me itch and break out if I handle them too much and are reputed to be somewhat poisonous. They don’t seem to have much affect on her, but she is hard on the plants.

    We got back to Glenner’s home base a few days ago and she is delighted. It’s cooler, the meals are more regular and she can sniff around and not gag on heavy and unfamiliar dusts.  She is back to sleeping on her futon, eating her daily beef and all’s well. Woooof.