Sausages, Snausages
I was idly skimming through a copy of Marketing at work a while back when the UK launch of the following essential product caught my eye:
Yes, these are exactly what they appear to be. Snausages Breakfast Bites are bacon and egg shaped food items for dogs, presumably for doting owners to feed to their little Fido at the break of day. Needless to say, they originate in America.
I’m sorry, but dogs do not care what their food looks like, as evidenced by their continued survival on miscellaneous brown and grey meat paste from a Pedigree Chum tin. Dogs will eat anything, up to and including sticks, stones and their own poo. Actually looking at what they’re about to scarf down comes as an afterthought.
And if your much-loved bundle of fuzz were to take a glance at these bacon and egg shaped travesties in the moments before slobbering, they’d be pretty disappointed. Because looking at the ingredients, ‘Breakfast Bites’ contain neither bacon nor eggs, making them a kind of zen food: What is the taste of no eggs and bacon?
Holy cow though, they do have oregano, black pepper, basil, rosemary and marjoram – that’s more herbs than I usually use when I cook something. The ‘chicken by-product meal’ sounds mighty tasty too.
A nose around on the Snausages site (and when typing ‘Snausages’ I have to resist the urge to follow it with a ™) uncovers a treasure trove of twee and pointless foods like these 101 Dalmations biscuits with facts about the film printed upon them:
Hint to manufacturers: Dogs cannot read. Humans can read but do not generally read dog biscuits. And even if dogs could read, they aren’t likely to want to know that each dog in a film they will never see has 32 spots. They would much rather have information as to what each character’s bottom smells like – that’s far more relevant to your average canine.
Honestly, novelty shaped food is something that should be restricted to small children for whom rocket shaped breakfast cereal, Billy Bear sausagemeat and alphabetti spaghetti will induce gurglings of delight. I notice that Snausages don’t seem to produce any cat-shaped dog biscuits - maybe that’s introducing owners to too much of what I like to call reality.
Talking about spaghetti though…
Come on now, dogs are descended from cunning wild animals streaking across open plains in groups, running down herds of deer and antelope for food. Wolf packs did not sit and decide to go for a quick spag bol or lasagne instead. A wolf deciding to go for a quick Italian just means it’s chasing a chap who’s particularly light on his feet. Pasta is not dogfood – the only reason Rover will eat this is because it’s wrapped around lumps of lamb and dogs can’t hide the bits they don’t want under their spoon like a child can.