Feeding & Nutrition

We came back from the coast with sand in everything and a bag of crab shells the dog had been gnawing on the beach, which I'd scooped up mostly to stop him eating them whole with the gulls watching. I meant to bin them. They smelled of the sea and of a child's bucket that had definitely held something worse. But the dog, Bramble, had other plans, and Bramble's plans about chews are the only plans in the house that survive contact with reality.

She'd been obsessed with those shells on the sand, hoarding them like treasure, and when I unpacked the bag at home she went straight for it, tail going like a metronome set to excited. I let her have one. The others I rinsed, because a shell with a week of beach on it is not something I want on the carpet, and boiled them for ten minutes the way you'd sterilise a bone you weren't sure about, which is to say cautiously and with the window open.

What happened next surprised me. The shells, picked clean and simmered, became the longest-lasting chew she'd ever had. Not the rawhide that vanishes in ninety seconds, not the pig ear that lasts a disappointed half hour, but a proper, crunchy, satisfying thing she worked at for days. The calcium was a bonus I hadn't planned; the quiet was the part I actually paid for.

I'd been buying recreational chews at three quid a pop, the kind that claim to be natural and smell faintly of a factory, and here was a free bag of the real thing from a beach I'd paid petrol to reach. The dog didn't care about the price. She cared that it cracked and splintered the way her jaw wanted, and that it tasted of the place she'd been happiest, which to a dog is probably the whole point of a chew.

There's a caution, because there always is with things from the wild. Crab shells are thin and can fragment sharp, so I never left her with a broken one, and I supervised the first few like a nervous lifeguard. The big carapaces are the safe ones; the little claw bits I binned, because a shard in a gut is a vet bill and a ruined Sunday, and the sea gives freely but doesn't sign a warranty.

We've been back to that beach twice since, and the shell-collecting is now part of the trip, a sort of free pet shop at the tide line. I bring a spare bag, rinse at the campsite, boil at home, and the dog gets a week of chews for the price of a plastic carrier. The gulls, I suspect, think I'm mad. Bramble thinks I'm a genius, which is the review that counts in this house.

The funny thing is how much calmer she is with a good chew. The afternoon I'd have spent stopping her eating the sofa, I now spend watching her work a carapace by the radiator, happy and occupied and not dismantling anything I care about. Chews are not just treats, they're the difference between a dog who's busy and a dog who's bored, and bored is the more expensive problem by far.

I wouldn't feed her the meat, mind. The beach crab is a different animal from the fishmonger's, and I'm not that relaxed about what the tide leaves behind. But the cleaned, boiled shell, given under supervision and taken away when it gets small, is the best free dog toy I've ever found, and I've looked, because free is a category I shop in heavily.

The neighbours think the bag of boiled shells in my freezer is eccentric, and they're not wrong, but eccentricity that buys a dog a week of quiet chewing is the kind I'll defend at the gate. Bramble agrees, or would, if she could articulate a position beyond the crunch, which is her entire philosophy and frankly a sound one.

I've since learned the trick works with other beach finds, the cleaned mussel shells, the odd limpet, all simmered and supervised, all free, all better than the factory chew. The sea, it turns out, is a pet shop with no till, provided you bring the common sense the tide doesn't, and the caution about sharp bits, which I'll repeat until the gulls tire of hearing it.

I've started a small ritual of it now, the post-beach boil, a pot on the stove while the sand still clings to the dog and the holiday is still warm in her coat. The shells go in, the kitchen smells of the sea for an hour, and Bramble sits by the cooker like a shareholder in the operation, waiting for her dividend of a clean carapace she'll guard like treasure for the week.

There's a smugness to the whole arrangement I won't pretend isn't there. I paid for petrol to the sea, fished free chews out of the shallows, and now I'm the clever one in the dog park, the man with the boiled-shell tip, when really I'm just the man who stopped binning the thing the dog already loved. Bramble, who never doubted it, watches my smugness with the calm of someone whose opinion was correct from the first shell, and she's right, as dogs usually are about the things they want.