One of the canine characters in my new book, Fuzzy Logic, is a Samoyed named Swoosie. Like many Samoyeds, Swoosie is an eager eater. In fact, she has a tendency to eat everything. That level of dietary indiscretion causes some issues for the humans in the book as well.
Swoosie is loosely based on my own Samoyed Fiona. To say that the furry Fi likes food would be an understatement. She’s not fussy. If it’s in the bowl, she’s eating it.
I don’t have to worry about offending her sensitive palate. I could feed her pretty much anything and she’d eat it. But I don’t.
In her daily fit of gluttony, Fi doesn’t pay much attention to what’s in her bowl. But as Fiona’s “mom,” I do.
At the grocery store, I read labels for the food my husband and I eat. In fact, years ago I got into a stupid argument with one of my then-in-laws about the loathsome fake milk product he was drinking. Ninety percent of the ingredients on the label were chemicals and not recognizable as any form of food at all. He didn’t see a problem with drinking something where there was pretty much “no food in his food” (to quote a line from the movie “Say Anything”).
I figure if I don’t know what something is on a label, I don’t want to eat it. I feel the same way about the food I feed my dogs. That means for years, I have fed my dogs expensive dog foods and read long articles about what some of the words on those pet food ingredients lists actually mean. (Hint: chicken byproduct meal is not the same thing as chicken.)
Now if only I could get Fi to stop eating things that are not edible. But that’s the topic of an entirely different post.
