Prescription Dogfood

I have a miniature dachshund. All in all she is a pretty good dog, although she is a bit mischievous when heads are turned. Sadly, she was one of the many besieged by the great dog food poisoning of 2007. The good news however was that her little 12 pound body pulled through the whole thing. In the process she was diagnosed with acute renal failure, which is what ended up killing all of the dogs less fortunate than mine. Since there is no real way to measure the amount of permanent damage sustained, the strategy is to play things safe from here on out. While we have no idea how this will impact the rest of her life, she is currently required to eat a prescription dog food, designed for animals with poor kidney function. The thing about this that I just don’t get is you actually have to have a written prescription for this stuff. You can’t just buy it at a pet store, it comes from a vet with a written script. I guess what I don’t understand is why it is so important for this food to stay out of the hands of those without a prescription.

Scraggly teen 1: "Dude, my parents are out of town and I just scored a whole shitload of prescription Alpo. Let’s get fucked up!"

Scraggly teen 2: "Oh my god, I heard about this dude who ate like 4 cans of that stuff, his parents came home and he was pooping in the kitchen sink and didn’t know his name."

Scraggly teen 1: "I know, my cousin's friend totally knows that dude. He said it's pretty good stuff."

Obviously, this isn't really the reason but rather that the prescription is for the safety of the dog itself. Still, it doesn’t make a ton of sense. First of all, if you were truly sick enough to want to do harm to your pet, feeding it an expensive dog food probably wouldn’t be your first choice. Feeding it nothing seems a lot less expensive and equally effective. Maybe I’m completely dense about this, but I just can’t see the point. I can understand needing a vet’s recommendation initially. I certainly wouldn’t have known which type to get. But after that initial advice, couldn’t the person just pick it up on their own? I don’t know. I do know this however, it makes it a colossal pain in my ass to buy food for my dog. That's why when she whines at her food dish, I just burn her paw with a lighter until she quits begging (Yo, PETA, I'm totally kidding, I would never do that...I use matches). This is really just a small gripe of mine, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.