April 13, 2009--Doggie Deuteronomy

This has been a week suffused with religious observations. There was Birchat HaChammah at dawn last Wednesday, which for orthodox Jews occurs just once every 28 years and marks the astronomical alignment of the sun and moon and stars that, it is claimed, replicates their position on the fourth day of Creation; then two days later it was Good Friday and on Sunday Easter.

In interfaith style, we celebrated Birchat and Easter on the beach, among friends, just before sunrise. The former silently with just the sound of the ocean and the later, without words, accompanied by the plaintive strains of five musicians—four drummers and a tenor saxophonist.

And last Tuesday, the first night of Passover, along with other Florida-based family members we were hosted at a Seder by my nearly 101 year-old mother. She no longer is able to make her famous matzo ball soup or gefilte fish, but the place where she lives does a good job and she is more than capable of presiding and holding forth during the reading of the Haggadah, the traditional meal, and well into the night after dinner hosting all eleven of us back in her apartment.

It has been quite a week. Divine, literally, but which also has its ridiculous side, which I cannot resist exploring. We do need diversions.

Back in our secular apartment, I noticed a piece in the New York Times (linked below) about dogs who eat only kosher food. I mean, who are fed kosher food by their owners.

To tell you the truth I had long wondered about that—what do Jews who observe the food laws outlined in Deuteronomy do about their pets? While they are careful not to mix meat and dairy dishes and are forbidden to consume any meats that come from animals with cloven hooves of go out for Chinese food and eat shrimp with lobster sauce (both of which are considered to be traif—not kosher), what do they then feed their pets?

If you’ve ever read the label on a can of Alpo or a box of Purina Cat Chow to find out what they contain, you can quickly see the problem. Almost all contain grains of one kind or another; and during the days leading up to Passover this presents a special challenge because many Jews make a great effort to rid their homes of any food products that contain them, taking a full month to do so and going so far as to rummage around in all their kitchen drawers and closets the night before the first Seder with a candle to light their way and a feather that they use to brush up even the tinniest of crumbs, which in turn they collect and sell to a non-Jew.

After that, for all the days of Passover, when all this chametz has been gathered up and the house has thus been rendered Pesachdik, and everyone who lives there eats only unleavened matzos, what to do about Puff and Spot?

Not to worry, there are entrepreneurs out there filling the kosher pet food niche. For example, Evanger’s Dog and Cat Food Company (which is endorsed by the Chicago Rabbinical Council), produces a full line of kosher pet foods. In fact, to promote their line of products, last week they sponsored a doggie Seder at a Windy City pet store called Wigglyville.

The Council did not require the meat in the Evanger’s kosher dog food to come from kosher cows—the Bible, they said, does not require that; but they did insist that Evanger’s include a note on the cans saying that they are not for human kosher consumption, which is probably a good thing these days when people wiped out by Bernie Madoff might be tempted to . . .

Others, also wanting to get in on things to market to Jewish pets, are trying to cash in. Alice Lerman, who owns Barker & Meowsky, a Chicago pet store advertised as a “paw firm” (terrible puns are out of control with these business owners) sells pet Judaica—tiny yarmulkes and tallits (prayer shawls) as well as toys made by a company called “Chewish Pets.”

These are also in hot demand for increasingly popular “Bark Mitzvahs.” So, as they are prone to say around Barker & Meowsky’s, “Muzzle Tov.”