mother, in her old age, wasn’t too keen on anything that wasn’t old.

“They,” whomever they were, didn’t make bread to taste like they did when she was young. “They” didn’t plant corn like they did in the old days. And clothes weren’t as warm as they used to be.

I once told her I had to take our dog to the veterinarian for shots. My mother remarked: “Shots? Shots? Well they sure don’t make dogs like they used to.”

A few years later when I told her our cat was sick, she of the barn cat era asked, “Well, what’s the matter with today’s cats anyway?”

I was reminded of my mother’s admonitions the other day while walking past the aisle of dog foods at Hy-Vee.

There were all kinds of goodies. Some was for young dogs and some for old. Some cleaned urinary tracts and others cleaned teeth or sweetened bad breath. Another variety that caught my eye was in a box sporting a picture of strips of what looked like bacon on it.

The box even contained little plastic tongs for lifting the bacon-like strips from box to bowl. Dogs wouldn’t know a strip of bacon from three feet of day-old pig guts.

There was a time when dogs ate what people didn’t. Millions of hounds survived swimmingly on what were called “plate scrappin’s,” which included everything from fatty glumps teased off Sunday’s roast beef to pork chop bones, potato peelings, cigar stubs, creamed corn and steamed carrots.

Some dogs even survived on leftover boiled peas and the string that held the ring of bologna shut. We gave our dog sweet desserts, like the hardened crumbs from the empty cake pan, burned pop corn, stumpy birthday cake candles and the cupcake paper after we ate the cupcakes.

He thought he was in hog heaven.

I don’t know when in human history somebody got the idea to go into the commercial dog food business. There was a time when packaging wasn’t the art it is today when grocery stores even refused to carry dog food. You got it scooped out of a bin at the feed or hardware store.

Then before someone came up with attractive packaging and the premise that dog food laced with vitamins and minerals and all the other healthy stuff that makes dogs better at slobbering on human faces, chasing cars and baying at the moon, would sell well. It did.

What this new-fangled early dog food venture consisted of was, I suspect, the leftover cereal grains and floor sweepings from the Purina breakfast food plant somewhere. A graduate of a fancy-dan business college working for the company figured out how to moisten it and force it through extruders so it came out in sausage-like lengths.

Soon extruder designs were making food that looked like gopher legs and tire-flattened squirrels. Later, the makers of dog food could even produce cereal and what-have-you that looked like little pork chops or T-bone steaks and lately, like bacon.

Of course, you and I know that this fancy-looking stuff wasn’t made so the dog would eat it. It was made so pet owners would buy it. Most dogs I know wouldn’t bat an eye at making a meal of decaying raccoon brains or the stinky carcass of a winter-killed carp washed up on shore.

After all, dogs today aren’t that much different than they were in my mother’s time.

But after viewing the grocery store dog food section, I guess they sure aren’t making store owners or pet owners like they used to, as my mother would have opined.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.