Smells like Chicken!

My dogs eat meat.

Raw meat.

With bones in it.

My cats eat cat food. They would like to eat raw meat.

Feeding time at my house is always an adventure. Most times, the dogs eat outside, however, this must be a carefully choreographed ballet that changes every day since the dogs don't eat the same thing all the time.

First, we as owners must put on our thinking caps at the beginning of the day, decide what the dogs will eat that night, and pull the appropriate package out of the freezer to set in the sink so it can thaw during the day. However, if they are eating fish that day, it must be left in the freezer until *after* work, since the stench would overpower us by the time we got home if we left it out all day. We get our fish off the screens at my family's Trout Hatchery, so they're not particularly fresh at the time of freezing. The dogs love them. You can see a picture of our waterfall here.

Next, the ballet begins. The dogs are Pavloved to know that when the TV gets turned off, they're most likely going to be fed. First, you must grab the food and get outside with all appendages still attached. Camie can be a bit "grabby" when she's hungry. Next, you divide the portions and place them on opposite sides of the lawn. Camie must be fed first, then Aly. Pack dynamics dictate that the alpha eat first, and Camie is nothing if not Alpha. However, Camie is also a Hoover. So by the time you put down her food, cross the lawn and give Aly her food, Camie is half done. Aly is a picker, and it takes her significantly longer to eat. SO, once you leave food for Aly, and get back to the side of the lawn Camie's on, Camie is done, and you must take steps to prevent the theft of Aly's dinner. Camie must be caught and brought inside with you. That is easier said than done.

The real fun is when it's too yucky outside for the dogs to "eat out". In these instances, they are fed in the kitchen, which means you add 3 cats to the choreography. Chrissy, the psycho orange pumpkin, generally does not cause a problem, except when the path of least resistance to escape the meat-devouring dogfest in the kitchen takes her up and over a human. Madison and Paris are a completely different story.

Madison is a slightly neurologically handicapped cat about 1.5 years old. She is that way because she had distemper as a kitten, which, if you can get them to survive, commonly leaves the cats with a balance and/or motor control problem. In short, her physical and motor skills halted at about the 4 month old mark, and she'll probably be that way the rest of her life. Very sweet, but not all there, and she falls down a lot. Basically, she's not mentally competent enough to recognize that two Huskies at 50 and 75 pounds could smash her into a pulp.

Paris is an 8 month old Siamese kitten that just appeared by our house one day when she was about 8 weeks old. She's daddy's girl, and after getting over the initial shock of having d.o.g.s in the same household as her royal highness, she's completely and totally oblivious to the fact that there are large carnivores in her domain. In the dog's defense, they are very trustworthy with the cats, which is uncommon in the Husky type dogs.

When we feed the dogs inside, it's a real challenge to see that Camie eats her own food and no one else's, that Aly actually eats her food, and that the two kittens who insist on poking their heads into the dog's raw dinner don't get eaten by accident. I'll have to make it a priority to get a picture of Paris pushing Camie's head, complete with bone-crushing jaw action, out of the bowl to get a tidbit of whatever Camie's eating at the time.

And that is feeding the animals at my house. Very interesting and amusing to me, perhaps not so much to someone else. But it is the way our house works, and I wouldn't have it any other way.