Give the dog a bone

Man's best friend still needs to eat like its Lupus forebears, believes Jonathan Self, when it's not guarding food, greeting us or destroying our upholstery, of course

- Jonathan Self

THE following appeal is made on behalf of your dog—indeed, on behalf of dogs everywhere. It is now more than 20 years since our farm vet persuaded me that our dogs would be happier and healthier if I gave them the occasional raw bone. I use the word ‘persuaded’ advisedly. Although an excellent vet, I doubted his claim that the canine digestive system could easily handle anything from a chicken wing to a lamb rib and so it was with trepidation that I doled out fresh marrow bones to an extremely eager and excited pack. Marrow bones—not to mention turkey necks, duck carcasses, pig trotters, goat tails (no, really) and all sorts of other bones—have since become a staple part of their diet.

Of course, the connection between dogs and bones goes back to ancient times. In some translations of Aesop’s The Dog and Its Reflection, written more than 2,500 years ago, the dog is carrying a bone. In Terentius Varro’s Rerum rusticarum libri tres, he advises: ‘Provide dogs with meat and bones’ and Psalm 37 in the Bible includes the words: ‘Righteous chews on wisdom like a dog on a bone.’ Literature is full of dog/bone references, too, from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, which includes a line about two dogs fighting for a bone (‘We stryve as dide the houndes for the boon…’) to Enid Blyton’s Bones and Biscuits: Letter from a Dog Named Bobs (‘But bones and biscuits! If a cheeky bird didn’t fly down to my nose and eat a crumb off my left whiskers!’). The theme also appears in art: the 15th-century illustrated manuscript Très Riches Heures shows a dog being fed a bone, Landseer was forever painting dogs with bones and Hergé’s famous cartoon dog, Snowy, is frequently pictured carrying an enormous one.