Dogs are not frogs.

My wife drew my attention to something she came across while shopping for stuff for the dogs. 

Jiminy's is a brand of dog products that makes its food out of crickets. "Cricket Crave" is not a joke. It is made from crickets, as well as oats and sweet potatoes and the inevitable quinoa. But the main protein is good ol' bugs.

I have a few thoughts on this, which I would like to share with you today.

1) Yuck.

2) This crap is expensive as hell: $21.95 for a three-pound bag. Double that price and you can get a 33-pound bag of dog food from most decent brands. You know, ones made out of meat.

3) Why do these kind of people always want us to eat bugs? This is the thin end of the wedge; if they can get us thinking the dogs like it, maybe we'll want to eat some bugs, too. 

4) And they really do want us to eat bugs, you know. CRIC, the Costa Rica Insect Company, gives us five reasons why insects are the food of the future, which I dispute thusly:

    Insects can be used for different purposes -- To which I note they already are, like food coloring, and I don't need to eat them to help them be used other ways.

    Insects have great nutritional qualities -- So does Soylent Green.

    Insects taste great -- Ask any toad.
    Insects are sustainable -- Even Vox had doubts about that; maybe if you just go around and eat whatever is in your yard, it would be sustainable. But factory-raising bugs may not be.  

    The consumption of insects is growing -- So is the number of Cardi B fans; don't try to bandwagon me, child.

5) The left-wing Guardian newspaper tells us, "If we want to save the planet, the future of food is insects." Are there any things so disgusting that we would be allowed to not do if the planet itself is at stake? "If we want to save the planet, we need to kill the feeble and everyone over 70." "If we want to save the planet, we must destroy Western civilization." "If we want to save the planet, we must all kill ourselves." Well, if it means saving the planet, then...

6) I am not feeding my dogs bugs. Dogs are not frogs. When little Nipper was a very young puppy he ate an ant out of curiosity and did not like it. I'm not doing this to them. I wouldn't if they were giving Jiminy's food away.

7) I was not the kind of kid that would eat a bug for a dollar in school, and I'm not going to pay to eat them now. Let Andrew Zimmern go eat all the bugs he wants; he gets paid a lot more than a dollar to do it. Even the kid from How to Eat Fried Worms was doing it to win a $50 bet, which was a good amount of dough when the book was published in 1973. Equivalent to $327 today.

8) Back to the dogs: You may remember a show called The Goode Family by Mike Judge of King of the Hill. On the animated show, the Goodes were such a painfully perfect liberal family that they only fed their dog Che a vegan diet, which results in other pets and woodland creatures disappearing from the neighborhood. Dogs are carnivores and they want meat.

9) When we had one of our dogs in training class, there was a couple that was trying to train their dog using... Cheerios. Now, dogs like Cheerios, and Cheerios are not bad for them, but training a dog means getting it to go against its own intentions and even instincts, and you have to come through with something better than dry cereal, especially if every other dog in the class is getting meat. That poor pup couldn't concentrate for beans. It's possible that the dog had some kind of chicken allergy or something else that made typical training treats no good for him, but I've always thought that his owners might be vegans and were intending to raise a vegan dog. Maybe it could be done--but not around other dogs eating meat. They had to leave the class. 

10) Anyway, vegans can't eat bugs, either--they won't even eat honey. Like the bees get the sads when we steal their loot. Bees are morons. Eat the honey.

11) Naming the company Jiminy's is kind of cannibalistic, isn't it? Jiminy, the well-known Disney pest, is a cricket himself, so by using his name the company is acting sort of ad litem for the bug, making him a quisling character at best. I'm surprised Disney hasn't sued. 

So there are my thoughts. If you don't like them, well, go eat a bug, I guess. I ain't doing it.