Tucker the golden retriever and his son Todd love nothing more than a taste test. Mini steak burgers; tiny tacos; sardine fish, eggs, and cups of milk: the dogs have the best time wolfing them all down.
But broccoli?
“Everyone knows that Tucker hates broccoli,” owner Courtney Budzyn told The Epoch Times, adding that dipping the vegetable in cheese sauce makes all the difference.
The 31-year-old content creator has an admirably relaxed approach to mess because staging these types of parties for her pets results in a lot of cleaning up.
“I think my favorite part was when I gave them the goat’s milk, and they were licking it all up. But because the cup was so deep their tongues were flicking it everywhere. It was all over me, and all over the kitchen,” she said.
Born and raised in Michigan, where she still lives, Ms. Budzyn and her husband got Tucker as a puppy in 2018. As soon as they brought him home, the couple quickly realized they had a character on their hands.
“I immediately fell in love,” said Ms. Budzyn. “He was just the happiest dude ever, and right off the bat had the biggest personality you could ever imagine: grumpy, sassy, but also goofy.”
“We call him ’the world’s therapy dog,'” his owner says, citing his endearing “old man grumpy vibe” as one of the reasons people love him so much.
Tucker and Todd get on great, but since the older dog was so used to getting all the attention, there was a bit of an adjustment period involved. Before they got Todd, Ms. Budzyn and her husband would take in new puppies temporarily for friends, to help socialize them.
“Tucker was used to having dogs come to the house, but they would leave. This time, he was really excited that Todd was here—a new friend,” she said. “But after a few months, he was like, ‘Wait, why isn’t he going home? Why is he staying?’ But he got over that real quick, and he realized he really loved Todd so much, and now he has a buddy to play with.”
Very much a mama’s boy, Tucker was a Godsend back in 2020 when Ms. Budzyn was diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, which greatly affected her health. Without any proper instruction, Tucker became like a service dog.
“I got really, really sick. Essentially, I just have really low blood pressure. I fainted a lot, and I couldn’t take care of myself; my body just wasn’t working for a while,” Ms. Budzyn said. “I didn’t train him, but he’s just so in tune with me, it’s almost scary. He knows when something’s going to happen before it happens. So he was a lifesaver to me. I didn’t think I was going to make it out of that.”
When renowned trainer Tom Davis of Upstate K9 Academy came to visit the home, he was “wowed” by the glossy golden retriever’s ability to read people’s emotions. For her part, Ms. Budzyn knows exactly what her dog is thinking, too. And because Tucker is “very picky—[the] pickiest dog ever,” the comedy value is high.
“When I’m editing videos, it’s almost like I can put invisible captions over his head in real-time,” she said. “When it comes to the taste test, I always do a bunch of natural foods. We try to give them food that we know won’t upset their stomachs, you know, because it’s not every day that they eat tacos and burgers.”
Tucker hates anything green—the couple call broccoli “the tree of doom”—but unsurprisingly, he adores chicken and steak.
Tucker also loves going swimming in the backyard pool and acting like a sled dog.
“We love to put our rollerblades on, throw on their harnesses, and let them pull us—they love doing that,” she said.
The two dogs are also really into Fast Cat (chasing fake bunnies around a track) and the canine sport of dock diving. But what they enjoy the most—especially if it involves a taste test—is having other dogs over to hang out and have fun.
“They love having other dogs coming over to play and having parties; I think [that’s] their main thing,” Ms. Budzyn said.
