“Give a Dog a Bone,” by Jeffrey Steingarten, was originally published in the December 1998 issue of Vogue.
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“A fat bitch,” I announced, licking the juice of a wood-grilled lamb sausage from my fingers, “is never an easy whelper.” I was reading from the breeding section of a book called The Golden Retriever: 47Exciting Full-Color Photos. Sky King listened intently but said nothing, and not simply because he had not yet learned to talk. I have found that young males of all species have a limited attention span when it comes to discussions of whelping and obesity.
But, as always, Sky King’s gaze was eloquent—as it had been earlier that evening when I dumped a plastic cupful of upscale dry dog-food pellets into his bowl and turned away to take care of my own dinner, a half-dozen fat little sausages crackling over a smoldering fire of oak and mesquite on the grill just outside the kitchen door. “I know that you are a fair-minded human,” he seemed to be saying, “and that you have only my best interests at heart. But are you absolutely sure that I should be eating this pile of dead and desiccated pellets while you experience the feral delights of sizzling flesh? Who’s the carnivore here anyway?”
I glanced back at Sky as if to say, “Cats are carnivores, dogs are not.” But I had gotten his message. Dogs did not evolve eating dry dog food, and they do not prefer it now. Sky likes a good tomato, a hunk of raw steak, a hunk of grilled steak, pitted cherries, peaches, pizza, overcooked lamb sausages, running shoes, and Fudgsicles. He is neutral on the subject of heavily salted corn chips and has little use for Good & Plentys. Sky loves to eat in bed.
Once our respective dinners were through, Sky and I watched the sun setting over San Diego, where he lives and to which I was paying one of my frequent visits. We went back inside and together began to formulate a plan for answering the critical question: What on earth is a growing dog supposed to eat? We ordered a dozen books over the Internet, settled into a comfortable chair, and began reading the relevant sections of The Golden Retriever: 47 Exciting Full-Color Photos, the only research resource immediately at hand. Apart from the caution concerning obese females, its culinary advice was sketchy: Dry dog food is the easiest, served four times a day and moistened with hot water for the youngest puppies, less of- ten and with less water as the puppy matures, and dry as a bone for adults. (The reasons: nutritional balance, total convenience, and minuscule stools.) This was the advice we had followed thus far with Sky King, whom my wife had named after a popular serial hero of radio and black-and-white TV in the forties and fifties, a fictional and fearless rancher-pilot who performed daring rescue and law-enforcement missions in his small private propeller plane. “Out of the clear blue of the Western sky comes Skyyyy Kiiiing!” each episode began. Sky’s name is not yet among the top ten for North American dogs, which are currently Sam, Max, Lady, Bear, Mag- gie, Buddy, Tasha, Chelsea, Holly, and Shasta. Tasha?