Monday, February 15, 2010
You won't catch his dog eating an avocado
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays in the paper's Extra section, steady as she goes.
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I was a little surprised to hear that the ASPCA has said that avocados are bad for dogs.
Surprised, but not worried, because there isn't a single avocado to be had in our larder -- or wherever you are supposed to keep avocados.
Our dog Max is not about to eat an avocado. I can assure the ASPCA of that.
The fact is that I don't like avocados with about the same passion that I hate broccoli unless it is smothered in melted cheese.
I don't know how Max feels about avocados or broccoli -- with or without cheese.
I do know that he is quite fond of salmon loaf.
I myself am a lover of sausage gravy, and now I am told that if it is made with whole milk, Max shouldn't lick my plate.
Fortunately, our sausage gravy is made with that white stuff that looks and tastes like liquid chalk.
Strangely, I've stumbled across a very long list of things that we shouldn't feed our dogs.
I think I remember grapes, for example.
It all tends to make you very nervous.
Max isn't dead yet
The other day I expected Max to sing his death song and leave us when my son gave him a wedge of canned corned beef.
The next morning, Max was out on his endless quests for squirrels that push the red-beaked morningbusters -- or something like that -- around to get at the birdseed.
And we decided not to take him to the vet for blood tests and a CT scan.
If Max ever catches a squirrel, don't worry about him eating it. I am going fix some squirrel gravy for me, if somebody will skin the sucker and do the necessary butchery.
I've got all the flour we'll need. And I promise not to hide my eyes.
And then these people say that you should never give your dog a bone because the slivers thereof will destroy his intestines.
Killer table scraps? Please.
I have been around dogs for a long time and all of mine have had enough sense just to gnaw on the bone and not attempt to eat it.
As a matter of fact, most of the dogs I have known don't like bones as a treat but like to bury them and then forget where they put them.
I don't like to say this because all of the members of my happy family hate it when I do. But back in my day, we fed the dogs table scraps.
And the dogs' longevity was fabulous.
Ben Beagle's column runs every Monday in Extra.
