Note: Wrote this last week. Never published it. It’s out of date! But also the treats are still just sitting in the fridge, because we went out of town over the weekend and then Fargo’s been sick today (think she’s fine, think there was just a daycare feeding mishap, no need to panic but that hasn’t stopped me from panicking). So, anyway, it all still stands.
Ok, first of all, it doesn’t smell that bad anymore.
Secondly, I’m not sure she likes them?
For those that didn’t hear: I tried making Fargo homemade dog treats yesterday, which is a lot less involved and a lot grosser than it sounds. I scooped a can of her wet food onto the cutting board, I spread it with a knife until it was about a third of an inch thick, I cut it up into little pieces. I placed those little pieces on a cookie sheet, tossed the cookie sheet in the oven—as one does—and checked on the cookie sheet every eight minutes, just like The Internet™ told me to. The smell got worse and worse. I at one point became dizzy? The dizziness might not have been the dog food. But it might have been the dog food. Who knows. This is probably how they discovered meth.
We gave her one of the “treats” last night—eerie little grundly things that resemble meatloaf but more closely resemble poop after it goes through the wastewater treatment process (shoutout Village of Lakewood Public Works Gang)—and she ate it, but she didn’t lose her mind over it, as she’s been known to do over sticks, human beings, other dogs, rotting carcasses, every single aisle at Petco, a knock on the door, a small bowl of ramen that somehow ended up in a storm drain, bicycles for a while there, split elk antlers, a dying mouse stuck under a woodpile, or even her dry food when we use that as a treat because we can’t give her anything that is not rabbit and (insert starch) lest her insides once again take a turn for the calamitous. Did she like it? I think so. I think she would’ve kept eating, had she been offered more. But she didn’t react to it like she used to react to treats. She seemed confused. Is this my wet food? What in the world happened to it? Dad? Was this you?
The reason I even cooked these things up was that we’re taking her to training classes again, and this time at a business which exists to offer training classes, rather than just Petco (which was great for our purposes but didn’t have a good backup plan when somebody flunked kindergarten because she could not handle sitting down and waiting for strangers to approach her on their own terms). They said to identify a high-value treat. The kibble’s high-value (all prescription dog food is, we’ve come to learn), but it isn’t a treat. We shot for the stars. Now there’s a Tupperware box of little meatloaf/poop balls in the refrigerator. It’s on the beer shelf. Which is also the sparkling water shelf. But is mostly right now the attempted-homemade-treat shelf.
Fargo picture for the room:
