Happy Easter to those who celebrate! While we promise we are NOT those crazy people who pretend their pet understands religious holidays and traditions, we just thought it would be fun to honour a holiday which combines two of his FAVOURITE things: bunnies and eggs.
We decided to nix the bunny... mostly because Barkley has a high prey drive and we didn't want to risk the life of a bunny on Easter. That still left us with eggs though and those of you who read my post on feeding raw know that they are one of his favourite foods! Our place is already a disaster because of all the packing boxes so we decided to embrace the chaos... and the eggs and plan a good old fashioned Easter Egg Hunt!
I hard boiled the eggs and decided to dye them using natural homemade dyes like the ones in this post. Obviously, I eliminated ingredients which are toxic to dogs like grapes, wine, coffee and onion skins and I decided to focus on dyes using Barkleys favourite foods. I completed this step yesterday and I completely forgot to take pictures so I will explain the basic steps:
For easy clean-up (because 1, we're packing and 2, this is for a dog who is likely colourblind anyway.) we decided to make only two different dyes and to play with the length of time each egg spent in the dye.
For my green/ blue dye, I used spinach and blueberries and for my yellow/orange dye, I used carrots, some beet juice and turmeric. We combined the ingredients with water and simmered in a small pot for about an hour or so. Once the colour was deep enough, we removed it from heat, added a couple of drops of vinegar and dropped in the eggs.
I used brown eggs since I can never find free-run white eggs at the local grocery store so the colours are a little muted and we did find that the eggs needed to be left in the dye for a long time. Still, we managed some colour and, I'll remind myself again that this step was only for me since I don't think dogs see colour anyway!
Not bad, right? The best part of using this method was that, after we dyed the eggs, Barkley could eat the spinach, blueberries and carrots!
And then the fun part: hiding them and making Barkley find all those delicious eggs! We used our packing boxes since Barkley tends to lack motivation and I was worried that if he didn't find them easily, he'd just go back to bed. Typical greyhound!
Even with our easy set-up, it took a couple of tries for him to actually pick up each egg and he needed help a couple of times. It's hard for a dog with an overbite to pick up small objects!
I wasn't going to post about this because, quite frankly, the subject matter is ridiculous. I mentioned it casually to some girlfriends last night and, maybe it was the wine, but they thought it would be an amazing idea for a blog post. In hindsight, I'm almost certain it was the wine talking. :) Oh well, enjoy what's left of the long weekend!
