A question about my dog

[azurnoir]

our dog Ruby refuses to eat 'game' meat , things like venison or wild goose and duck. This came up the other night when I made some venison we had been given for dinner I offered Ruby some and she sniffed it and gave it this sad kind of disturbed look that she gave the body of one of our cats that died a few years back and refused to eat it. She has done this same thing in the past with the meat from game birds too, it's cooked when she's offered it (she won't eat raw meat of any kind) but she will very readily eat any meat purchased from the grocery store as long as its cooked

so the question is how does she differentiate between the two?

a note Ruby is not a small dog she is a 70lb pit/lab mix

[get the red out]

1. Intense sense of smell in dogs

Dogs have an amazing ability to smell, we can't even imagine the way they can differentiate smells, so if it smells like something she doesn't like she will know faster than we would and not eat it.

As to why she doesn't like it, I have no idea. Our dog won't chew on bones. She loved marrow bones as a puppy and would work and work to get the soft marrow out but once fully grown she started turning her nose up at them even though most dogs love them. I have no idea what that's about.

[TorchTheWitch]

2. maybe just because it's something new and different?

Yoshi is always suspicious of anything he's not familiar with. Just today I let him lick out the last molecules from the peanut butter jar, and since he's never had it before he was immediately suspicious. He has to go through a whole examination ritual that can take awhile while he ponders whether or not some new food is tasty. He'll sniff it, stare at it, walk a few circles around it to see if it moves or does anything else weird that food doesn't do, then he'll just hang out with it for awhile until he finally works up the courage to do a taste test. I have no idea why he goes through this ridiculous ritual every time he is given something to eat that isn't familiar especially since he's happy to eat any strange thing he finds on the ground, dirt, rocks, tree bark, road kill, cigarette butts in the gutter, chewed gum mashed into the pavement, etc., etc. I guess if he figures he finds it himself and it's on the ground it's already guaranteed to certified delicious. He's weird. But it's their weird quirks that are so endearing.