Ice cream is going to the dogs — but in a good way. Vermont’s ice cream shops, snack shacks and creemee stands have really upped their pup-cup game in the last few years. Now, dogs with sophisticated palates can cool off with an occasional dish that’s fancy enough to make a Starbucks Puppuccino blush. Here are three local spots offering delights for canine companions, as well as sweet treats for their humans. Olive It lu•lu, 185 Main Street, Vergennes, 777-3933, luluvt.com If you peer through the front windows of lu•lu’s big stone-and-brick building in Vergennes, you’ll see farm-to-spoon ice cream experts cracking eggs, steeping milk, swirling epic maple creemees, and scooping scratch-made flavors such as basil, orange-cardamom, salted caramel and Backyard Mint Chip. If you look directly below the front left window, you’ll see a tiny canine ice cream expert with a wicked underbite, probably napping. That’s Olive. Lu•lu founder Laura Mack adopted Olive five years ago, after being fully charmed by that underbite and her Flying Nun ears. Now, the slightly lazy, lumbering boxer-miniature schnauzer-pit bull mix — named for Olive Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine because they share a similar full-body wiggle — spends her days going on wholesale deliveries with Mack and watching the world go by outside lu•lu. “Olive has regulars that she’s obsessed with,” Mack said. “If she has had a long day of dealing with people giving her attention, she gets a doggy ice cream as a reward.” Mack had considered creating a dog-specific ice cream prior to rescuing Olive but finally made it happen once she had a connoisseur to taste-test everything. With her fine sense of taste and smell, Olive deemed the peanut butter-banana-honey combo the winner. (She wasn’t so keen on a version that included blueberries.) Now, lu•lu sells prepackaged four-ounce containers of the dog ice cream ($3.25) to a loyal following of local pups. (Well-behaved dogs are welcome inside the shop but not back in the production area.) It’s safe for humans, though they might prefer the popular SlumDoug Millionaire, a curried peanut butter ice cream created by Mack’s father, Doug. “We take our ice cream ingredients really seriously,” Mack said. “I knew I wanted ingredients that were really dog-friendly, more healthy and less sugary, and gentle for any of our four-legged friends.” The special treat is kept in a super-cold freezer; the lower temp forces dogs to…