Farrukh Dhondy | It's not a dog's life: Fancy ice cream, a misguided but loving treat

“If in the beginning there was only a word

With no ears of any sort for it to be heard

The prime vibration

From which all creation

Came to be? Surely that’s absurd!”

From Solemn Honeycomb, by Bachchoo

The old ditty about hot days in India began with the phrase “Mad dogs and Englishmen…” Should a certain recent phenomenon prompt us to alter this slightly to “Dogs and their mad Englishmen”? I mean I just read an advertisement for “Vegan Dog Ice-Cream”. No, gentle reader, you aren’t hallucinating! The five-litre package for vegan dog ice-cream sells at £120 and is being vigorously marketed and sold.

It’s not the only brand on the market. There’s COOL DOG DOGGY ICE-CREAM for £30 a tub. Then there’s FROZZY’S DOG ICE-CREAM selling at £32+ for 12 bite-size tubs.

Here’s how it’s advertised:

“Frozzys -- The lactose-free lickable frozen yoghurt ‘Ice Cream’ for dogs. The tasty Cranberry flavour is rich in vitamins, minerals & fibre. It’s the healthy everyday complimentary food for good doggies! Made in the UK from all-natural ingredients.” It goes on to list its key qualities:

*Rich in calcium

*Contains vitamins & minerals

*Low in calories

*Lactose-free

There are many more and I won’t crowd this column with them -- you get the point.

You rightly assume that I have, through my short and happy life, vast experience of both pet dogs and ice-creams. In my boyhood in Pune, we had five dogs at one time in the house. They were fed one meal a day consisting of rice floating in meat broth, cheap meat on bones and mixed boiled vegetables left over from family meals. They gobbled this mess up avidly and we assumed with deep satisfaction. Even in the moderate heat of Pune’s summer, they were never given ice-cream.

Which was in our childhoods a treat. Of course, there was the common or garden variety -- flavoured ice on a stick -- known as “ice-fruit”. In our school it was sold by a vendor on a bicycle, known to us as Manji. On the handlebar of his bicycle, he hung several large thermos flasks in which the one, two and four-anna ice-fruits were carried. I suppose these were manufactured somewhere in the city and vendors like Manji were sent out to retail them.

Then something changed in Pune. A restaurant chain called Kwality established itself and began to make and sell relatively sophisticated ice-cream -- not only in the restaurant itself but in three-foot cube containers on wheels attached in front of peddled cycles. One of the Kwality vendors targeted our school and turned up in our break times outside the walls and gates as a rival to Manji, who consequently lost almost all his clientele to this “superior” brand, which even called itself ice-cream.

Manji tolerated the competition docilely for a few days but then the whole school witnessed a physical fight between him and the Kwality man in the quiet street outside the school walls. The squabble saw Manji off. He didn’t return. I fancied myself as a loyal client of his and regretted his departure. Not so my classmate, one Vasant Sirur, who declared that it was good riddance, as in his view and idiom “Manji was under Kwality’s balls”.

Then in our college days, a gentleman called Maganbhai opened a stall in the market yard where he and his employee churned by hand several flavoured ice-creams in a mould inside a wooden bucket filled with crushed ice. It was delicious and became a regular and prosperous haunt of teenagers.

Then trouble stuck the stall. It was rumoured that the police threatened to close it down, saying it was infested with rats and cockroaches. Maganbhai, it was said, refused to pay the bribe the cops demanded to turn a blind eye and instead was prosecuted and framed and went to jail. When he came out, he restarted his stall and was as popular as ever. We suggested to him that he change the name of the stall to “Badnaam ice-cream”. I don’t think he did.

Now, I don’t know where the idea for dog ice-cream came from. It’s surely biologically obvious that dogs will eat boiled rats if that’s what’s available. I did know that my uncle in Mumbai would treat his female dog to slices of banana and mango, but not to ice-cream.

Obviously, the Doggy ice-creamwallas are prospering in the UK as more and more brands hit the market.

Are the British pet owners who feed their dogs the now more cheaply available Pea and Vanilla flavoured variety from the economic supermarket Aldi, crazy, eccentric, deluded by marketing dietary propaganda or just pet-loving and indulgent? Was our family’s menu of cheap meat, rice, oily soup and left-over vegetables a manifestation of neglect, of contempt or even of “speciesism”?

Our five dogs, I insist, lived very healthy and robust lives and, apart from the one killed by being run over by a bus when he was indiscriminately crossing the street, lasted through a “good innings”, as the Brits say.

I incline, gentle reader, to regard this popularity of doggy varieties of ice-cream as misguided but loving indulgence. And this is no part of a hoax, but I have to add that not only is there canine ice-cream on sale, there is now an extremely brisk trade in specially marketed caviar for dogs. Bring on doggy-champagne? Canine Claret?? Bow-wow!