Food’s Best Friend: Greta's Magic Dog Mush
My wife Greta is viscerally wracked by the sight of a snake. Any snake, garden-beneficent or not. Her rectum spasms and her heart lunges into her throat as if to block the scream that could alert the snake to her bite-worthy presence. She screams anyway and flees.
Unless the snake is in distress. One day driving along a parkway with friends, we saw the car ahead of us bump over what looked like a log in the road. As we covered the same ground, we realized the log was a snake. It was strung out half the width of the roadway. Greta squeaked from the back seat: “Oh, my god, it’s a rattlesnake! Stop the car! Stop the car!”
So we pulled over. Greta piled out and walked into the shrubby woods that lined the shoulder of the road and came back with a small tree limb. She approached the injured animal (while the rest of us cowered in the car mewling epithets), lifted it up gently, and carried the limp monster back into the woods.
“I think it was still alive,” Greta gasped, regaining her seat. Adding with a visible shudder: “It was so beautiful.”
I have become unsurprised by Greta’s good-witchy affinity for all Earth’s creatures. Until her forced retirement during COVID, Greta was an animal acupuncturist – one of the few licensed acupuncturists in the nation also certified in the treatment of animals. She was esteemed by every client. Grieving pet owners came to her when their veterinarians had given up and Greta typically revived their ailing, aging dogs and cats for at least another good-quality year or two or three. She jokingly called her home-based solo practice the “Last Resort & Spa.” Regular dog clients began woo-woo-wooing in a happy way as soon as their human drivers turned into our neighborhood. Greta’s business thrived purely on word of mouth, no marketing required. She was even extolled in a photo-heavy feature article in the Washington Post. She never treated a pet snake, but she occasionally treated horses, lizards, and cockatiels as well as rescued foxes and coyotes at the wildlife refuge.
Greta and I got our first dog as a couple a good decade after we’d partnered. She’d been hinting and asking, and I’d made all the noises you make to sound agreeable without actually committing. In bed one night, she turned to me as I was snatching the day’s last moments with the novel I’d pulled from the stack of five on my nightstand. She said: “You know how you need to read?”
“Sure,” I mumbled, trying to hide my unwifely irritation at the interruption.
“Well, that’s how much I need a dog.”
Ooooohhhhh!
Within a month we adopted our first rescue dog, Bailey – a pure-bred chocolate Labrador Retriever with one gently wayward eye, like Barbara Streisand’s from a certain angle. From the start, Greta insisted we sustain Bailey on homemade, human-grade meals. She’d grown up with dogs (as I did) who only got dry kibble or canned moist muck, whatever was cheapest. When they aged or got sick, we fed our pets an expensive “scientific” diet proffered by the veterinarians who sold for retail what they’d gotten for wholesale from the major pet food suppliers. As with our own highly-processed foods, the long list of chemicals in the tiniest of fonts seemed a bounty of what surely had been proven to be good for our beloved animal companions.
But as an acupuncturist, Greta began to recognize the damage that traditional, industrialized agricultural waste, which makes up about half of our pets’ diets, was doing to their bodies and spirits. The lackluster hair and eyes; the dental decay; the early joint injuries and arthritis; the diabetes and cancer.
She studied up on the basic nutritional elements essential for a dog or cat’s daily health and longevity, and began experimenting with raw and cooked meats and vegetables. We got a chest freezer for the basement so she could stock up during grocery store sales. She found Peter, a guy who worked in a local organic meat processing plant who scraped up the leavings, sausaged them into tightly sealed plastic rolls, and sold them around the region out of the trunk of his car. Stolen leavings? We didn’t ask, he didn’t tell.
Eventually she settled on the recipe I offer to you and your own dogs, below. The relative amounts aren’t written in stone, but you’ll want a good balance. Thanks to our chest freezer, we have typically made our dogs’ food in bulk in the space of about 3 hours – enough to last two dogs about 4-6 weeks.
Our first dog Bailey’s rough, dark brown coat became a kissable tawny sheen. Her googly eyes sparkled. Her tongue glowed a sturdy red as she took to her bowl with unsightly Labbish zeal. In her later years, vainly hoping to spare our hearts some pain, we paired her with a transition puppy rescue named Toby. He was the blackest of blue-black Lab mixes. At about three months, his paws were the size of his head (the mix, we figured out, was Mastiff – Mastidors, they’re called). He outgrew his first $25 harness in a week.
Bailey eventually died of cancer just shy of 14 years old. Toby grew into a 150-pound sweetpea who also, it must be said, killed a couple of outdoor cats and once heaved his front paws like a battering ram into the chest of a (thankfully forgiving) man who approached me too quickly on an evening walk. On Greta’s diet plan, Toby became a stunning specimen with a gleaming raven coat, brightly white teeth, and a regal head that attracted the stares and compliments of almost everyone we sat next to at stoplights on those must-hang-my-big-sweet-face-out-the-open-car-window days. He completely recovered from early surgeries on both of his back knees (a common defect in this mix) and otherwise lived a healthy life.
Our current dog Peaches, all 50 pounds of feisty mongrel that she is, was our transition dog for aging Toby, who regained his appetite once Peaches got him playing again. We figure Peaches (and Greta’s magic recipe) added about three years to Toby’s life. He lived beyond the expected big-dog expiry date, to the age of 12.
Toby died at our home in Maryland just before we moved with Peaches to Roanoke, Virginia, in 2020. The last six years have offered a few life challenges for Greta and me, so we have not adopted a transition dog as Peaches continues to age. Her back legs are failing thanks to spinal degeneration and she can no longer manage our local hilly hikes. Her peaches-and-cream coat still shines over the benign lumps and bumps, though her once-blackish snout has turned an elder’s pearly white. But at the age of 15, she’s a gamer who can sometimes still get herself sopping wet rolling over and over on her back in the dewy grass.
Greta’s Magic Dog Mush
Food can be a dog’s best friend when it’s made with your version of Greta love and (as you’ll see) just a little bit of up-to-the-elbow grease.
Serves 2 Labbish dogs for 4-6 weeks.
Have on hand two to four empty five-gallon plastic buckets, the kind you find at hardware stores.
Ingredients (all family sizes; organic if you can find and afford it)
- 10 big packets of boneless chicken thighs
- 2 big jars of no-added-sugar apple sauce
- 2 big cans of pureed pumpkin
- 4 big bags of frozen green beans (alternative: a mix of peas and carrots)
- 24 eggs
- 12 sweet potatoes
- 2 bunches of parsley, chopped up
- supplement powder (vitamins, minerals) from a reputable source, the amount and formulation determined by the maker. We used the Balance It brand from a company run by a Board-certified Veterinary Nutritionist.
Instructions
- Assuming high-quality meat, Greta believes all the food is best for them if kept raw. However, if you or your dog prefers cooked:
a. Place the sweet potatoes on cookie sheets and bake them 400 degrees for about 30 minutes. When they’re done, roughly cut them into chunks.
b. Place the boneless chicken thighs on cookie sheets and bake them at 425 degrees for about 20 minutes. When finished, chunk (don’t puree) the chicken thighs in a food processor or roughly chop them.
c. Put frozen green beans into a large casserole dish and – dish by dish – microwave the beans for about 9 minutes (until most beans are defrosted and tender; okay if they’re cold). - When everything that needs cooking and chopping is done, divide it as equally as you can into your plastic buckets – dumping in the apple sauce and pumpkin, cracking the eggs and composting the shells OR pulverizing them in a food processor and sprinkling the shell fragments on each meal for a great source of calcium.
- Now for the “fun” part! If you haven’t already, put each bucket on the floor and push your hands to the bottom of the wonder-goop and begin to robustly churn it – lifting and folding and mixing and squishing between your fingers. I’ve done this up to my yolk-dripping elbows. The first (and second?) time, as Greta stood beaming at me, I may have tried to hide my gagging. One time I tried to spare myself by throwing all the glop into a plastic baby pool on our deck, so I could mix it from a distance with a rake. That approach failed miserably, though our cat Itty Bitty enjoyed the moment.
- Okay, okay… you don’t have to mix this stuff entirely by hand if you run out and buy yourself a plunger blender – a rod-like electric blender with a small blade that you can push in and pull out in a Whac-a-Mole way. You will still gunk up your hands, but the tool will do most of the disgusting mashing for you.
- We scoop the food into Tupperware and freeze it. You can also use gallon-sized freezer bags, but that’s messier. And you’ve had it up to your elbows with mess, yeah?
- As a final flourish, pour some bone broth of any kind onto the meal before serving your drooling beasts.
Just keep repeating to yourself: Rover would do it for me if he could…Rover would do it for me…..
