Fri, 02/03/2023 - 1:05pm

The Epicurean Tastes of a Buzzard

Dogs will eat ... well, just about anything

Main image + captions in jpg file names

 

The Epicurean Tastes of a Buzzard

 

By M.J. Nelson

 

Some dogs are perfectly willing to eat with great relish things that, if they don’t actually cause humans to outright gag, retch and vomit, at least cause us to go “Eeewwwww!” And that doesn’t even include stuff like grass, pig ears, rawhide and cow leg bones that merely elicit a “Yuck!” or two. 

Then there are some like my current dog, who has a super-sensitive GI tract, and as a result is so selective about what he eats that only kibble that costs more than a C-note per bag topped with homemade chicken loaf that’s nearly as costly to prepare keeps him and his tummy happy. Luckily, our meat market will grind chicken, so his food is not made even more expensive by having to use a protein source such as lamb. 

But eat roadkill or even the rare chipmunk he manages to catch? Not a chance! He’s a really fine hunting dog with the titles to prove it, and to be perfectly candid, despite the fact that all his instincts would tell him to grab downed birds, run off with them and eat them, he has never put so much as a single mark on a bird — and not just because he’s been force-broken. He’s just too picky to even bite down on one.   

But there are others, like Alex, a yellow Labrador belonging to a guy I hunted with for a few years, whose epicurean tastes were very similar to that of an emaciated buzzard. In other words, he’d eat anything and everything. The results of this indiscriminate eating were frequently not pretty to either observe or smell.

Strictly speaking, dogs — like their original ancestor, the wolf — are carnivores. But somewhere during the evolution from canis lupus to canis lupus familiaris, dogs acquired a gene that expanded their gustatory horizons to the point where they are now omnivores, a word which, if a friend of mine who is a Catholic priest is correct, is made up of two words — omnis, meaning “all,” and vorare, meaning “devouring.” I have to take his word for it because the only Latin I ever needed to know were the lyrics to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” and Caesar Franck’s “Panis Angelicus” unless you are willing to count a college French course, since all the Romance languages are said to be descendants of vulgar Latin dialects. But I digress.

Anyway, back to Alex. He would happily consume things that would cause even a half-starved hyena to recoil in horror. Oddly enough, his catholic appetite — the lower-case “c” is important here — never included birds, as he was as soft-mouthed as a dog could possibly be.  

Alex was a big, happy, friendly, amiable, goofy dog who was not only a first-rate retriever but a great companion — most of the time. The issue with him was his appetite, both in terms of quality and quantity. That was a good deal as far as dog food and even a few table scraps were concerned. Dave, his owner, never had to go out of his way to keep Alex happy with what was put in his food dish. No, the problem was with all the stuff he’d find for himself, and even that wouldn’t have been a big deal if his digestive system would have been a match for his eclectic tastes, or perhaps a better phrase would be his lack of taste.

If I searched my hunting logbook, I could maybe find a time that I was around Alex when he didn’t throw up in his crate or the back of my truck or the motel room or on Dave’s living-room carpet. But off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single instance when we were together when he didn’t decorate one of these areas in his particular way, and it was never just a wad of grass like every other outdoor dog hurls now and then. It never ceased to amaze me that a 90-pound dog could hold what seemed like 50 pounds of roadkill, dead fish, deer guts or any other illicit meal he had managed to consume when no one was looking.  

There was also a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever I met on several occasions whose tastes rivaled Alex’s. No one who ever spent any time around Riot ever had to ask why Neal, his owner, always brought along an old flat-bladed shovel, a spray bottle of pet-stain and odor remover, a bottle of Pinesol® and a small duffle filled with old bar towels, latex gloves and a couple of rolls of paper towels wherever he went with the dog. That amount of cleanup equipment was necessary, because when Riot decided to unload one of his stolen meals, it was not the discreet upchuck employed by most dogs with a tummy upset. He would pace back and forth with a chorus of rumblings and bursting bubbles that his owner — a geologist by profession — said compared favorably to the sound of a volcano on the verge of eruption. This pre-eruption warning would always culminate in an amazing amount — for a dog his size — of wet, putrid mess being dumped in some difficult-to-clean area seconds before we, either his owner or I, depending on who was driving, could get the truck stopped and the crate open. Or, if he happened to be at home or in a motel, the door to the outside open in time to get the dog out before he made his deposit.  

One unforgettable occasion with Riot occurred after he’d eaten something that would have required a PhD in forensic science to determine exactly what it had originally been, but the scientist would have had plenty of “remains” with which to make that determination. This time, the shovel, the cleaner and the bar towels were totally inadequate. This mess required a hose, and not just an ordinary hose, but one attached to a power washer, because whatever he had eaten not only reeked but was sticky. We finally found one at a car wash, but despite the deodorizing soap, the power wash and a new dog bed installed in his crate —  along with the one that had received Riot’s contribution having also been given the power-wash treatment, completely sealed in a plastic bag — a sort of miasma surrounded his crate that defeated even the powerful deodorant spray Neal purchased at the convenience store next to the car wash.   

My long-time Nebraska upland-bird-hunting partner had a Brittany who didn’t confine his gastric adventures to just critters, although Rusty cheerfully consumed any and all that he could get his teeth on — except, like Alex, game birds, as Russ was also a super soft-mouthed dog. 

One of Rusty’s favorite snacks was bovine effluent. He was particularly fond of the really awful, sloppy, green stuff that makes up the springtime meadow muffins when cattle first start eating fresh green grass. It must have somehow satisfied his vegan side. Rusty had a habit of waiting to disgorge the mess until sometime around 0-dark-30 and then always on Bill’s living-room carpet. 

After two springs of trying to clean up the mess and get the green stains out of the rug, Bill gave up and made a deal with a carpet-cleaning service in Lincoln. While the mess still had to be cleaned up, with the carpet cleaners on call he or his wife Phyllis only had to make a token effort to remove the stain. Rusty also, at one time, consumed an entire 64-crayon box of crayons left at Bill’s house by a grandchild. This venture into exotic eating resulted in a rainbow of colors in the carpet and another emergency call to the carpet cleaner.

There was another unfortunate consequence connected with Rusty’s frequently disgusting and wide-ranging tastes. He didn’t always bring up all his more exotic culinary adventures. Some of what he consumed made its way through his digestive tract, and the results were unpleasant, to say the least. I was present a few times when the normal bacteria in Rusty’s gut had time to break down some of his more bizarre gastronomic adventures.

To describe the sudden, silent fume plume that enveloped us as Rusty relieved the pressure in his GI tract as “foul” would have required a redefinition of the word. It is no exaggeration to say that I shed fewer tears and coughed/choked less on those occasions when, in my real job as an investigative reporter, I was unlucky enough get caught in a cloud of tear gas than when I was exposed to the slow-moving, slow-to-disperse cloud of pure stench that emanated from Rusty following one of his more outlandish meals. While Bill and Phyliss were more or less accustomed to the zephyrs of reeking redolence that Russ produced, they’d still open all the windows in the room, even in the dead of a Nebraska winter, and reach for the deodorant spray. Still, those efforts really didn’t do anything more than slightly relieve the effluvium. 

The Environmental Protective Agency says there are about 100 million tons of methane produced annually by animals. I’d wager that during Rusty’s lifetime he produced a considerable percentage of that amount all by himself.

None of these three dogs had any gastrointestinal issues and were extraordinarily healthy dogs, requiring trips to the veterinarian only for their yearly vaccinations. Despite, or maybe because of, their unorthodox eating habits, Alex, Riot and Rusty lived long and wonderful lives. But when they finally crossed the rainbow bridge, in addition to their noteworthy abilities as hunting dogs, they left behind permanent memories in the form of indelible stains on numerous home and motel carpets.

 

 

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