I don't often give my dog Nadi "people food" anymore because her old little tummy can't handle the challenge. She always wants some when I am eating and while I do feel bad for her begging cute eyes I also know that there's a good chance that she will later throw up if I give in and let her have some.
But rules were made to be broken from time to time I think and on this one day I gave her a leftover treat that I'm pretty sure she dreams about.
I got invited to a group dinner on Wednesday last week to a place called Bo Steakhouse. It's a bit of a silly name because "bo" simply means "beef" in Vietnamese so the name of the place is basically "Steak Steakhouse" and I guess that is just fine.
It's not a terribly good restaurant but it is price appropriate, I suppose would be a nice way of describing it. For less than $10 you can get a steak with a few sides that are so small they are kind of embarrassing. But I was there for something else and it is the lamb shank. I don't do this because I particularly care for lamb, I get it because lamb bones are one of the few cooked bones that are safe to give to dogs and Nadi was definitely more thrilled about this dinner than I was.
She gets hyper protective once she gets the bone and then goes into a sort of trance while she is consuming it. She makes sounds that I never hear her make during anything else when she is focused like hell for the hour or so that I let her have it before taking it away.
Even though she cannot splinter these bones because they are very dense and her teeth are not very strong, there can still be other things inside of it such as the tendon there and I don't want her to do something stupid like try to swallow it whole and choke to death. This is a highly monitored situation when she gets the bones and a bit later on I will distract her with something else and take the bone away. Nadi would never bite me, but she can get her little feelings hurt if I take away a treat and well, we don't want to do that now do we.
It was funny because she actually was very active in her chomping of the bone, so much so in fact that when she was done she laid down for a nap immediately afterwards.
I have a lot of friends here that come from all over the world and most of them are not from North America like I am. I think some of them were hearing for the first time in their lives because it doesn't often come up, that Americans just generally speaking don't get a great deal of lamb in their lives when they are growing up... or I suppose when they are adults. I can't speak for the entire country, but lamb just isn't a meat of choice in USA for whatever reason.
In my 27 years of living in the United States I never once to my knowledge had any lamb to eat. My grandparents and two of my uncles were farmers and all of them had livestock of some sort but it was never lambs. I am sure they exist somewhere but in the areas that I grew up in unless it was in a zoo I never so much as saw a lamb. Lamb is just part and parcel of life in Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe as I have come to find out.
The way I look at it is that it is fine but I would rather have pork or beef if I have a choice. Nadi on the other hand, would very much prefer that I get lamb because then she gets a special treat that she normally would never get. Bones once nearly ended her life when she got some chicken ones caught in her throat and on another incident there was a choking hazard because of a goose neck, which is a common thing to feed dogs according to my Korean friends. Pork bones, because of the splintering factor once cooked, is definitely not something she ever gets.
When all the meat was stripped away we had two mostly completely clean bones but I still put them in the fridge and will get them back out later today to see if she is still interested in them. My money is going to be on "yes."
