Columbus, Ga. ? It’s a hot afternoon. It’s time for Tracy Jones to give Savannah, 2, her homemade snack. Both make their way from the living room to the kitchen, where Jones removes a fruity popsicle from the freezer. Then a few homemade biscuits from the kitchen counter.

Savannah, following close behind, shakes her long blond hair. She eats the snacks then takes a few sips of water. “Good girl,” Tracy says, bending to the floor and patting her on the head.

Savannah is a dog, a golden retriever. And her owner cooks for her.

“I don’t feel like it’s nutritionally balanced,” Jones, 32, said of most dog food on the market. “I think most people would be shocked if they knew what was in it.”

So Tracy Jones cooks. And not just doggie snacks resembling store-bought meaty bones. Savannah’s breakfast usually consists of scrambled eggs or steamed vegetables. For her evening meal, the golden retriever eats bits of white-meat chicken breast that Jones cooks once a week and refrigerates and disperses throughout the week. Also on the canine’s menu: turkey muffins containing garlic :quot; which keeps the fleas at bay.

On Savannah’s birthday, which is April 27, she gets a filet. As in steak.

Savannah’s two main meals a day go atop kibble, hard dog food, which Jones special-orders off the Internet. Savannah dines every day from two stainless steel bowls: one for water, and one for food. Both bowls sit in holes in a specially designed wrought-iron table that’s about head-high for Savannah. It’s her table. Tracy and Steven Jones’ table sits a few feet away, from which they do not offer their dog table scraps.

Jones, who along with her husband has a full-time job, said she’d cook everything for Savannah if she had more time.

“I would if I could,” said Jones. “Her latest favorite thing is low-fat cottage cheese.”

Jones is not alone in her affection for her dog. Obsession, some would say.

Thirty-six-year-old Carrie Staut of Columbus, Ga., put one of her three dogs on the Atkins Diet to control a chronic ear infection. She has cooked whole turkeys and ducks for the dog, at the advisement of Auburn veterinarians. The premise of the Atkins Diet is that too many carbohydrates convert to too much sugar.