Is Dog Ice Cream Proof We’ve Lost Our Minds?

It sounds like a joke, but it may be a sucker punch for pet owners

Pete Hamill, the celebrated American journalist, said that jars of mixed peanut butter and jelly were the final proof of the decline of a great nation.

I wonder what Hamill would have thought of dog ice cream.

You might imagine that frosty treats for your schnauzer were a harmless bit of seasonal whimsy, like tying a star-spangled bandana around your pet’s neck on the Fourth of July.

But dog ice cream is a year-round craze, and not just in America.

I caught my first scent of it about a year ago when I saw a box of Purina Frosty Paws in a freezer at a Winn-Dixie here on the Gulf Coast. By the time a trend gets to my small town in Alabama, it’s usually worked its way around the Lower 48, and I suspected I was looking at a fad that was killing it in the tonier precincts of New York City.

Then — in August — a British magazine ran a story called: “Dog Ice-Cream: Proof We’ve Lost Our Minds.” It coincided with International Dog Day on August 26, and you don’t want to think too closely about why the same day honors dogs and women, who annually mark the anniversary of female suffrage then.

A British journalist named Mary Wakefield had seen at her supermarket a tub of Scoops vanilla dog ice cream (“Tubs that get tails wagging”), and she looked it up.

“It was as if a door opened onto our national psychosis,” she wrote.

Wakefield learned that along with Frosty Paws, you can buy Dogsters “ice cream style treats for dogs,” Wiggles and Wags Freeze-Fetti, and Woof and Brew Pawsecco “freeze pops.” If you want to be Betty Crocker to your Duke or Bella, you can buy Pooch Creamery “ice cream mix.”

I sensed that Americans might have started this madness, the way came up with those jars of mixed peanut butter and jelly, and my hunch was right.

It seems that a retired animal science professor at Ohio State saw two women feeding their dogs ice cream and warned that it wasn’t healthy. They challenged him to create an alternative, and Frosty Paws, the first frozen canine treat sold in the U.S., arrived in 1989. Regular ice cream is unhealthy for dogs because adult dogs are generally lactose intolerant, and the brands made for them typically have no or reduced lactose, a natural sugar found in milk.

Then came competitors like Hoggin’ Dog Ice Creams and the “probiotic” Wag More Bark Less Iced Treats. Two years ago, Ben & Jerry’s joined the pack with its first two “Doggie Desserts,” both named after employees’ dogs: Pontch’s Mix (peanut butter and pretzels) and Rosie’s Batch (pumpkin and cookies). This year Cool Dog launched a vegan, “artisan” dog ice cream made with “antioxidant superfoods (fresh bananas and fresh blueberries).”

What’s the point of all this? Why pay $2.99 for a 4-ounce cup of Ben & Jerry’s when for a few cents you can send most dogs into paroxysms of bliss by sticking your finger in a peanut butter jar and letting them lick it off?

Wakefield suggested we’ve forgotten what most dogs enjoy eating, which is just about anything. She wrote:

“ ‘My puppy wolfed it down!’ says a review on the Frozzys website. Your puppy wolfs down horse droppings. A few weeks ago I brought back two tubs of Jude’s dog ice-cream for Hippo, a sweet-natured and beautiful brindle dark Staffie who visits the office from time to time. Hippo ate the contents of both tubs, followed by their cardboard containers and a tennis ball.”

You might protest: But that’s England! Here in the USA, we don’t have a liberal supply of horse droppings lying around for the delectation of our dogs.

No, we don’t. But in New Jersey, where I spent my formative years with the four-footed, dogs will eat crabgrass sprayed with some of suburbia’s deadliest carcinogens if you don’t keep them away from it.

You might rationalize the money you spend on dog ice cream by telling yourself it’s “healthier” than other things your dog eats. Obviously, it’s true if the alternatives are horse droppings, crabgrass, and your boxer shorts.

But consider three ingredients in a dog frozen yogurt sold at Whole Foods, the Bacon & Peanut Butter Frozen Yog Dog Treat. They are “dried aspergillus oryzae fermentation solubles, dried rhizopus oryzae fermentation solubles, and dried trichoderma longibrachiatum fermentation solubles.” Do these sound healthy to you?

None of this is happening in a canine vacuum.

It’s all part of a trend toward coddling dogs with special foods like Dogviar, a £50 tin of “caviar for dogs” sold in the U.K.

Here in the U.S., “gourmet” dog food shops or departments of pet-supply chains have thrived for years. The Bow Wow Baketique in suburban Detroit sells not just cakes and cookies made with “dog-friendly ingredients” but a canine “non-alcoholic beer, a meat and barley-based broth.”

Yes, you read that correctly. There’s even a fake beer for dogs.

Was it invented by the people who gave us those T-shirts that say, “In dog beers I’ve had only one”? Is it a way of making your pet’s meals, like your own, Instagram-ready?

Or are people so desperate to avoid drinking alone that they’ll settle for a Chihuahua on the barstool? If so, it’s a sad commentary on the loneliness people are trying to fill in ever more bizarre and expensive ways.

The trend, alas, is escalating. Aldi has bought Winn-Dixie, and it’s closing the store where I first saw Frosty Paws. The German supermarket chain sells its own brand of dog ice-cream that it promotes with “dog-livery trucks” that hit U.K. parks in August. Aldi reaped a publicity bonanza, with stories in media “from Lands’ End to John o’Groats,” as the Brits say.

All of this has put a canine tradition in my area in perspective.

Every year my town kicks off its Mardi Gras festivities with a walking parade — no floats — for dogs and their owners. My neighbors deck their dogs in beads and jester’s caps and march with them — or push them in prams or strollers — along the main streets. Some people paint their dogs’ nails purple, green, and gold, the Mardi Gras colors, for a day.

No doubt some Northerners think we’ve lost our minds. But who, really, is saner: people who adorn their dogs with beads for a few hours once a year, or those who keep their freezers stocked 24/7 with fake beer or Prosecco for their pets?

@JaniceHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist on the Gulf Coast. She has been a writer and editor for Glamour and the book critic for Ohio’s largest newspaper. Her work has appeared in many major print and online media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon.

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