the dog is actually an undercover FBI agent (you gotta keep this a secret).
about the spatula, it was mostly an afterthought to create more feedback for the player clicking the meat sprites. It is purely a visual effect that I implemented in the last 12 hours of the jam. I could have definitely reworked the controls to work in conjunction with the spatula, but that would involve a complete rehaul of the physics system. I do see the value in the spatula helping the game be more intuitive, Ill probably consider it next time, but for the jam it was way outside of the project scope, and I don't have enough experience making physics games to implement something like that at the moment.
Thanks for the feedback!