Dogs are Weird

I'm talking food here. Both my dogs love food. Sleek is more discriminating -- she generally wants some form of meat in her snacks -- but Fluff will often eat things like blueberries or apples. I think when she was young she helped herself to some tomatoes from the vine. That's one reason to go with cherry tomatoes: at least you can probably get some toothmark-free tomatoes. Sleek was mad about prune plums for a few years when we had a tree in the backyard. She would eat several windfalls at one sitting, including their pits. All that fiber, surrounding all those very hard, pointy things. I felt for poor Sleek when she said goodbye to those pits.

Anyway, I have leftover Easter eggs and decided to give the dogs part of one of the egg whites. I did a good job with the boiling, so these were very nice eggs. Each dog sniffed her ~1/2inch cube of egg white very suspiciously but took it from my fingers. Fluff laid her egg bit on the floor, where it seemed to be difficult to pick it up again. I handed it to her again, and she mouthed it for a while before swallowing it. Meanwhile, Sleek is chewing and chewing hers. Now, this dog eats a raw chicken wing in about 3 crunches, with none of it touching the ground after its first introduction to her mouth. I have seen her swallow entire four-ounce chunks of meat, but she has to chew 3 grams of hard-boiled egg???? Sleek caught and ate a baby rabbit one time, and I think she chewed that less than she chewed this stupid piece of egg. If she deigns to take a Cheerio, it's the same thing. A single Cheerio must be chewed 20 times. A quarter pound of liver need not be chewed, only inhaled.

I've read that dogs have fewer tastebuds than we do, and that seems reasonable given that most of their diet doesn't stay in their mouths long enough to even leave a flavor. Good thing they have the 10x stronger stomach acid!