My little dog, Pof, died suddenly recently. He was my best friend and inspiration for many of the things I do, including this column. We had an odd but sweet way of picking subjects for the newspaper.
As there were so many subjects to write about, I would often recite to him some titles that sounded relevant, and generally, his eyes and ears would perk up on a particular topic. And that is what I would write about. It was a way of filtering out much of the research that goes into this column.
Losing Pof felt initially like an overwhelming dread in the middle of the night when lost somewhere strange and the moonlight disappears unexpectedly behind a cloud. Then as his death sinks in, it becomes like an ice-cold anvil had lodged in the chest, weighing heavily on the heart and lungs; even the air smells dull and different and the mind tangibly pounds with grief and sorrow. As Pof was always a curious creature, I think he would like an article about the ideas that humans have about nutrition for dogs.
Because he often said to me with his eyes, “Yes, it is OK to give me that tidbit under the table because nobody will know”, even when I was debating in my mind whether he should have another lump of cheese rind. And until his death, I had never researched that topic, probably because I never asked him, and he was never the pushy type. So this article is about nutrition, just not for humans, but for the best friend of many humans.
And it is more interesting than one would expect..
