Seriously - Dogs are treated better than our kids!

So, I was having a conversation with a new friend on Facebook today.  She and I have a common bond, well a few of them actually, but met through a mutual friend.  We are both "juicing" right now to get healthy.  If you've ever done the "juicing" regiment you will know that when doing so you end up with quite a bit of pulp from the fruits and veggies that you are juicing.  I don't like to waste so we were having a discussion about what to do with all that pulp.  After all, I don't want to just throw it away.  There has to be something to be done with it.

I suggested making a broth with it however the more I thought about that I thought it might taste kinda funny given it has fruits and veggies in it.  She had a suggestion that she's used before with giving it to the dogs in their food.  Then began the "dog" conversation.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am in love with my dog Bear.  We've in the past year added another dog to our family, Astro, who really had a tough road to earn my love given how much I love my baby, Bear.      But because I am such an animal lover it happened a lot quicker than I anticipated.  Now Bear is an Alaskan Huskey mix.  He is beautiful, wonderful, and truly the best dog I've ever had or ever will have.  I look at it that I have 5 children...well 6 if you include my husband. :-)  But, only three of them actually came from my womb.  The other two children in our family are our four legged furry kids.  Bear has some allergies with food.  He can only have the all natural, no wheat, no soy, no corn, no cheap dog food.  He is a big boy so his food is not cheap at all and he goes through it pretty quick.  Given that is the food we buy for Bear, when we adopted Astro that is what he got too.  Now, he is the same and can't have the cheap food or he reacts to it in the form of red, itchy skin.  But, because we love our boys and we are responsible pet owners we do what is best for them and bite the bullet with the expensive dog food.

I like to give them a reprieve from the plain, dry dog food occasionally.  Because I love them I think that it would really be awful to only get the same thing every day, all the time...dry dog food and water.  How boring!  So, I spoil them.  When I make gravy for our meals I save the extra gravy and pour it on their food a couple times a week.  Sometimes I will really go the extra mile to give them a good meal, and yes I am still talking about my dogs, and I make them a mixture of brown rice, lean ground beef, and cooked veggies.  I think this is why they love me so.

Back to my conversation with my friend, she is the same as me.  She does the same with her dogs and "spoils" them with some good, nutritious food.  All of a sudden that whole idea and process prompted this enormous, gigantic light bulb to go off in my head.  I am not the only one who spoils their dogs with good food.  Notice the key word in there..."spoils".

See, when we are talking about our pets spoiling them means that we give them good, nutritious food.  And dogs agree!  To them, getting a "home cooked" meal is spoiling them.  And they reward you for your efforts by way of lots of love and big doggy kisses.  But look at how different it is with our kids.

My kids don't get to go out to eat very often.  I believe in trying to minimize the amount of unhealthy food, preservative soaked, chemically enhanced food that I feed my family.  I make as much as I can from scratch, I make all my own bread, I buy from local farmers instead of the grocery stores, I buy as little as possible of the pre-processed mechanically made foods and junk foods.  By a dog's standards my kids are spoiled rotten!  However....

In this wonderful country of ours "spoiling" our kids means that we take them to McDonalds, order a pizza, or buy an unhealthy snack.  Do you see the irony in all of this??  Does this make any sense at all?  NOOOOOO!  To play on words a bit, by doing these things we are "spoiling" them...but not in the good sense.  We are training these kids that a "treat" is something unhealthy when in actuality the treat should be that they are given the good, healthy stuff  that will help them live a longer, healthier life.  So basically what we are doing is telling kids that the "good stuff", the treats are the unhealthy things.  So when they get older, have their own jobs and have "arrived" in their careers someday and can afford whatever they want they will gravitate towards the treats, the off limits items that they couldn't have all the time when they were kids because those were "treats".

Dogs are treated better than kids!  We treat our dogs with good food but we treat our kids with crap food.  Interesting perspective isn't it?  Kinda makes me think about what I am really teaching my kids vs what I have taught my dogs.

I will continue to treat my dogs.  What I have learned today however is how I should, or should not, treat my kids.