Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Don’t Toy With Me
Things are not as they might be, I suppose, but I am back and of course I missed you all terribly, each and every one of you. It’s a bit disturbing to return to my site and see that all my lovingly-crafted posts have slipped off the page, stale and superannuated; I’d be at home eagerly typing crap up and preparing some of my seven thousand photographs for posting but FedEx has inexplicably delivered my computer, ostensibly freshly repaired by HP, to a crabby neighbor who has not been around since we returned from our wanderings late monday night. I’m a bit miffed about it, but mostly because I like using the word “miffed.” If she isn’t around tonight so we can get the damn thing back from her, I’ll have to have FedEx buy me a new one. That’s how it works, right?
So, how was my trip?, I hear you asking in your overworked anxious little minds. (Yes, I can hear that stuff in your minds, and you should be ashamed of yourself.) It rocked, my friends. I’ve got Aloha coming out my ass and I don’t care who knows it. Best Vacation Ever. I might have a little tidbit or two about it as time works its wonders on us all, but in the meantime, we got the pets out of hock yesterday and Kel brought Coz home with a plastic bag on which she’d written a note before leaving it with him at the kennel: “Chewys for Cosmo - Give every so often, he might not be interested.” Damn, how could he not be interested in it? Inside the bag were five leftover anatomical curiosities that any self-respecting dog would beg for. I’m shocked he needed a doggie bag.
Maybe I’ve just gotten cynical in my post-vacation old age, but dogs are getting some damn gross chewys these days. Unbelievably repulsive items are being salvaged from the weiner factory for special treatments to turn them into dog toys. Materialistic dog owners and slaughterhouse proprietors may already be up on this disturbing trend, but we didn’t buy Coz many “special” treats until recently, and I’m frankly freshly revolted by the gruesome selection now available for canine nutritional entertainment.
You may know about the pigs ears already, I suppose, and the snouts and the forelegs severed at the knees - select cow or pig, at your pleasure. All these are available basted and flavored so as to render them irresistable, because god knows I’d resist them pretty damn rigorously myself, all things being equal. But dogs love them. “Give me that good tasty ear or snout,” Cosmo invariably implores us with his limpid greedy gaze. And it’s so hard to say no.
Sometimes, in fact, we say more than “yes” - we’ve gone and gotten him a big flavored tendon to crunch and savor. These days, though, his favorite chewtoy is the pizzle. Cut from a steer or bull, so they tell us, the pizzle is an external organ signalling secondary sexual characteristics. It’s a tight slim rigid tube, brown in color, which we get in the 15” length though they are available in a variety of convenient sizes, much like they are in real life, I suppose. They are simply jerked cattledix, and Cosmo loves them. He’ll sit with one propped up between his paws and gleefully suck on it, nibble it, gnaw on it with his enormous jaws, wedge it between his legs and start shredding it, yanking it into isolated fibers and sodden masses until what was brown has gone grey, what was rigid has gone flaccid, and an odor of baked-on goodness emenates from it that fails to mask a deeper natural raunch that disturbs me on almost every level.
The one thing we can’t be getting is the trachea. Yes, steer tracheas are now being prepared as dog treats. They look, curiously enough, like tracheas: gaping cartilege tubes, stiffened and flavored for that extra meaty tang you just can’t get from untreated tracheas. And this is where I find solace: that I am not the person who had to write the following copy for the packages of flavored tracheas, tendons and mojumbos: “We naturally enhance their color and flavor by slow roasting them in their own natural juices for up to 53 hours.” No joke, this is exactly what the packaging says. I’m not sure how natural it is to “enhance” a donkey shlong by slow roasting it in anything for up to 53 hours, and the thought that the roasting is taking place in said organ’s “own natural juices” does not render it any more palatable to me. I don’t like it much, but I have to put it out of my mind - don’t look at it when I hand it over to him, don’t watch him as he crushes it into a protein mush. It makes the dog happy, and I guess the donkey isn’t using it anymore.