Feeding & Nutrition

My spaniel, Tilda, had ears that smelled like a wet tennis ball for the best part of three years. Not constantly. In summer, mostly, and after a spell of rain, and I blamed the weather because the weather was easy to blame and the vet kept shrugging and handing me a bottle of drops.

The drops worked, for a bit. Then the smell came back, and the head-shaking, the kind where she'd whip her whole body sideways like something had bitten her from the inside. I'd clean them, dose them, and pretend it was under control. It wasn't.

A friend with two cockers told me, flatly, it's probably the food. I laughed. We were on a decent brand, the one with the happy dog on the front and a price to match. Chicken was the first ingredient. Of course it was chicken. It's the first ingredient in everything, or so it felt at the time.

I wasn't ready to believe her. Food allergy sounded like something people on forums invented to sell you bison and sweet potato at twice the price. But the drops were costing me a fortune and Tilda's ears were still warm to the touch, so one Monday I did the boring thing and read the back of every packet in the cupboard.

Chicken was in the treats. Chicken was in the dental sticks. Chicken was in the training pouch I kept by the door for walks. The poor dog hadn't eaten a meal without it in years. I'd been topping up the very thing that was likely inflaming her with snacks on top of her dinner, and calling it love.

So I switched. Slowly, because you're meant to, over a week, onto a fish-based food with no poultry hiding in the meal or the gravy. The first two weeks nothing happened and I almost gave up and went back to the familiar bag. The third week her ears cooled. The fourth the smell was just gone, like someone had switched off a tap I'd stopped noticing was running.

The head-shaking stopped too. She'd been doing it in her sleep, a little twitch I'd written off as a dream about squirrels. It was an itch. It had always been an itch, and I'd been soothing it with the wrong end of the problem.

What gets me is how long I blamed the rain. English summers are wet, the garden is mud, the dog rolls in both, so the ears were guilt-free. The weather made a perfect alibi that cost me three years of drops and a dog who itched through every July.

I'm not saying chicken is the enemy. Plenty of dogs thrive on it, and I'd be a fool to wave it at everyone. But if your spaniel has ears that smell, run warm, weep a little, and the vet's drops only ever buy a few weeks, look at what's in the dish before you look at the sky.

We're on fish now, with the odd bit of lamb, and her coat is better for it too, which I didn't expect and didn't ask for. The drops sit in the cupboard untouched, gathering dust, and I can't remember the last time I smelled that tennis-ball whiff under her chin. Tilda, for her part, has no opinions on poultry politics. She just shakes her head less, which from a dog who used to shake it constantly is the only review I needed.

The whole thing cost me a few quid more a month and three years of overthinking I can't get back. The vet, when I went back to say the ears were clear, just nodded and wrote something down. He'd probably been hoping I'd figure it out myself, and quietly betting I would, eventually, once the weather stopped taking the blame.

I tell other spaniel owners now, the ones with the whiff, to do the boring read of the label before the bill. Most nod and do nothing, because chicken is cheap and familiar and changing food feels like admitting you were wrong about a bag you've trusted for years. But Tilda's ears are the argument, and they don't argue quietly.

There's a lesson in here about listening to the dog instead of the calendar. I'd filed her itching under summer, a season, not a cause, and seasons don't answer to drops. The cause did. It just happened to be sitting in her bowl the whole time, disguised as the most normal ingredient in the shop, the one nobody thinks to question.

The butcher asks me now what she's on, and when I say fish he nods like he's heard it before, and maybe he has, from every third spaniel owner with the same whiff and the same slow realisation in the queue. We compare notes, and the ones still on chicken are the ones still buying drops, and I bite my tongue about the weather they keep blaming.

Tilda doesn't know any of this. She eats her fish, shakes her head maybe twice a week now instead of twenty times a day, and sleeps through the summer she used to spend itching. The tennis-ball whiff is a memory, the jar of drops is a relic on a shelf, and the chicken, the innocent-looking chicken, is the villain of a story only I remember, which is exactly how she'd want it.

I read labels aloud now, in the shop, like a man talking to himself, because the lesson cost three years and I don't trust my memory. If a packet hides poultry in the gravy under a name I can't pronounce, it goes back on the shelf. Tilda gets fish, and a clear conscience, and ears that finally smell of nothing at all.