Puppy love
Mini chocolate cupcakes. Cinnamon rolls. Peanut butter cups.
But the baked goods sitting on the counter of the Pooch Barkery in downtown Ayer aren’t meant for the human palate.
If you bite into those yogurt-covered, sprinkled pretzels, you’ll taste garlic and chicken. The donuts – cheddar and bacon. And those tortes? They’re turkey-flavored.
Yuck. To you, maybe.
The bakery with the playful name is just one recent addition in a flourishing market catering to doting pet owners. And the goodies offered here might distract even Pavlov’s famously salivating canines.
“When the dogs come in here and have treats, it’s special,” said pink-apron-clad shop owner Mary Kelly, who spends hours in front of an oven, baking the “sweets.”
“It’s not every day they get to have a doggie donut.”
The Ayer shop joins the Polka Dog Bakery in Boston, Paws & Whiskers in Provincetown (which offers “poochie sushi”), Best Friends Bakery in Gloucester, (which supplies treats up and down the North Shore), Uptown Dog in Falmouth, and a smattering of others. And the boutiques are certainly apropos, given the recent rash of pet food contamination scares – leading to some dead pets and lawsuits – that have prompted more owners to turn to local sources of chow.
