Feeding & Nutrition

There was a packet of oatcakes at the back of the bread bin, gone soft and a little damp, not the kind you'd put cheese on anymore, and rather than bin them I crumbled one over the dog's dinner on a whim, because waste bothers me more than it should and the dog, frankly, does not care about texture the way I do.

He ate the lot and then spent ten minutes hoovering the floor around the bowl for the dust I'd missed, which is the most enthusiastic I've seen him about anything that didn't involve the word walk or the sound of the lead jingling on the hook.

That told me something. The biscuit he gets is fine, it keeps him alive and glossy, but it doesn't excite him, and a dog who's excited by floor crumbs is a dog who might enjoy a bit of texture he wasn't expecting. So the oatcake became a sometimes-thing, a crumble over the top, a change of mouthfeel in an otherwise uniform bowl, the canine equivalent of a person discovering their toast is better with a bit of crunch.

They're plain, which is the part I like. Oats, a little fat, no sugar, no salt, no the-long-list-of-things-I-can't-pronounce that sits on the side of a treat bag like a warning label. For a dog with a tendency to itch, plainer is safer, and the vet's been clear that most of his flare-ups trace back to something I fed him, not something in the air, which rather puts the responsibility back on me and my bread bin.

I don't give a whole one. They're dense, and a dog doesn't need the carbs, so it's a crumble, a quarter maybe, broken fine so there's no choking risk and no lump he can guard. He's a guarder, my boy, and anything he can pick up and own becomes a small negotiation, so fine and mixed in is the rule, and the rule has kept both of us calmer than a whole biscuit ever did.

The crumbs, as the title says, follow him round. He'll carry one to the rug, drop it, pick it up, drop it again, the way he used to with a Kong when he was young, and I let him, because a dog amusing himself is a dog not destroying my shoes, and the maths is firmly in my favour on that particular exchange.

My mother says I'm soft, feeding the dog biscuit scraps like he's a Victorian child, but she's the one who leaves her own oatcakes to go soft, so I consider us even, and besides, the dog's weight's steady, his stools are firm, and he's happy, which is the whole brief, isn't it, the thing you measure a dog against when no one's watching the scales.

I've tried other stales since. A bit of plain rice cake, a corner of pitta gone dry, even a shred of the soda bread my neighbour brings at Christmas, all crumbled, all watched for anything onion or grape or the other quiet poisons that turn a kindness into a trip to the vets. He's not a dustbin, he's a dog, and the line between treat and trouble is one ingredient wide, a fact I repeat to myself like a mantra.

What the oatcake taught me is that variety doesn't have to mean a trip to the pet shop. The interesting food was already in my bread bin, just past its best for me and perfectly fine for him, and the dog, who asks so little, got a small surprise in his bowl and a few minutes of crumb-chasing for his trouble, which is about the cheapest entertainment I've ever provided.

The bread bin's tidier for it, if I'm honest, because now I watch for the gone-soft packet instead of binning it blind, and the dog gets a crumble, and nothing's wasted, and I've stopped being the person who throws away food a dog would happily finish, which is a small but real kind of growing up I didn't expect from an oatcake.

Some evenings there's no stale anything and we have the plain scoop, and that's alright too, because the point was never the oatcake, it was the noticing, the small act of paying attention to what might please him that wasn't on a shelf with a barcode. The dog doesn't know about barcodes, he just knows the bowl was different tonight, and different, for a creature whose whole life is routine, is a small gift, one I can give for the price of a biscuit gone soft at the back of the bin.

I've taken to buying the oatcakes a day before they'd go soft on purpose, which my partner calls sabotage and I call planning, and the dog, who knows nothing of the timetable, just knows the bowl's interesting again, and the floor's worth scanning, and the evening, for a creature with few surprises left, has regained a small and harmless one that costs me nothing but a slightly stale packet.