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LiverDecember 13, 2007 Last month when the vet stuck needles in Rhodry and gave him cookies, she also recommended that I give him "organ meat" once a week. Well. Rhodry's lived his long and healthy life almost entirely on kibble, and not the high-end stuff either. Sometimes I mix an egg in, I wrap whatever pills he needs in cheddar cheese or peanut butter, and whenever there's a mixing bowl or a pot to lick, he gets it. He loves popcorn à la Susanna (with butter, tamari, and nutritional yeast), gets half of all the 99-cent bags of Doritos I buy at Cumby's or Our Market, and scrounges whatever he can from the horses and the cats at the barn. Sometimes he comes out of the woods smelling like fish guts (around here malodorous dogs come in two scents: skunk and fish guts), either because of something he rolled in or something he ate. Ask me no questions, he says, and I'll tell you no lies. I know diddly about organ meat so I asked the vet if I should cook it. She said raw was fine. The liver I bought at Reliable Market looked a little too fresh from the cow -- or steer, more likely -- so I sautéed it in a little water, cut half of it into strips, and laid it on Rhodry's breakfast kibble au jus. He ate on the deck. I watched through the window. That, I thought, is one satisfied dog. The other half I froze for the following week. I'm not a vegetarian, but I don't cook all that much meat for myself, and I'm not sure I've ever knowingly eaten "organ meat." In shape the raw liver looks like a steak, but darker, stronger, more intimate. Truth to tell, it makes me a little squeamish. To my way of thinking, an animal's organs are closer to its soul than any slab of muscle. Slapped on a plastic tray, wrapped in cellophane, the liver looks enough like a liver that it's harder to ignore that it was once a functioning liver in a bovine body. Slicing the lightly sautéed liver for Rhodry's breakfast, I remember reading somewhere that maybe eating liver isn't a good idea because whatever toxins the animal takes in are concentrated there and here I am feeding this poisonous gunk to my dog. Such thoughts never come to me when I'm cooking hot Italian sausage or linguiça for myself or crumbling hamburger into a casserole-to-be. It's harder to visualize sausage or hamburger ever having been part of a living animal, and wasn't it Otto von Bismarck who said it was best not to watch laws or sausages being made? Rhodry doesn't worry about this. He is a law unto himself, and he doesn't read labels to assure himself that there's no trans fat in his snacks. He doesn't live in a dog-eat-dog world, but in his world there is definitely a place for dog-eat-cow, dog-eat-popcorn, and dog-swipe-whatever-he-can-from-the-cats. If he's surprised to find in his dish the kind of stuff I yell at him for rolling in, he hasn't let on.
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