Feeding & Nutrition

The summer the temperature hit thirty-eight, my lab, Juno, stopped being a dog and became a puddle. She lay on the tiles, refused walks, and paced the kitchen at three in the morning because the floor was the only place that wasn't radiating heat back at her.

Someone online suggested frozen broth cubes, and I'll try most things once when a creature I love is suffering. I made a plain chicken stock, no salt, no onion, no garlic, nothing a dog's liver would object to, and poured it into an ice-cube tray I quietly retired from human service.

Once frozen, I'd drop two or three into her bowl with a splash of water. She approached the first one with suspicion, sniffed, then cracked it like a tiny iceberg and spent a happy ten minutes chasing the melt across the kitchen floor. The pacing stopped that night.

It wasn't just the cold. Licking releases something calming in a dog, the same reason they'll worry a frozen Kong for an hour. The cube gave her a job, a texture, a slow reward, and the heat became something she could lap at rather than endure.

I got fussy about the stock after the first batch. Shop-bought cartons often hide onion powder, and onion is the quiet poison people forget, so I started simmering a couple of chicken wings in water for an hour and straining it. Cheap, clean, and Juno would hear the lid and appear from wherever she'd been hiding.

We went through three trays that week. I kept a backup in the freezer door, next to the peas nobody eats, and the sight of that little tray became oddly comforting. It was a small, controllable kindness in a week that felt out of control.

By the end of the heatwave she'd regained her afternoon nap and stopped the three-am circuit. The cubes became a summer habit, not a rescue measure, and now when the forecast tips past thirty I make a tray without being asked.

If your dog paces in the heat, skip the salt, skip the onion, and skip the idea that a bowl of water is enough when the air itself is boiling. A frozen cube turns suffering into a game, and a dog at play is a dog that's forgotten to be miserable.

Juno's grey now, and the summers keep getting hotter, but the tray in the freezer door is non-negotiable. Some of the best care I've given her cost less than the wings I'd have thrown away anyway.

The wings themselves became a small comedy. I'd buy a pack, roast the meat for us, and simmer the carcass for her stock, feeling smugly frugal, until my partner pointed out I was now buying chicken specifically to feed the dog the bits we didn't want. The frugality was a story I told myself.

It didn't matter. Juno didn't care about my economic reasoning; she cared that the cube appeared when the air turned to soup. On the worst day that summer she dragged her bed to the freezer door and waited, and I obliged, because a dog who asks for something that helps her is a dog worth listening to.

We've since added a second tray, one of plain water with a smear of yoghurt, for the days the stock runs out. The system has a backup, like all good systems should. The heatwave passed, but the habit stayed, and Juno, grey and slow, still gets her cube on the hot days, because some small kindnesses outlive the emergency that invented them.

There's a lesson in Juno's relief that I apply to myself now. When something's too hot to bear, the answer is rarely to push through it; it's to find the cool spot and stay there until the air changes. She taught me that by simply lying on the tiles and refusing to pretend otherwise, and the cube was just my way of meeting her halfway.

The wings from that first batch are long gone, the tray's on its third, and the habit's now part of the summer the way sunscreen is. Juno doesn't know she trained me to keep a freezer stocked; she only knows the cube appears when she needs it, and that, from a dog's point of view, is the entire contract.

What stays with me is how a dog can teach you to slow down without a single word. Juno never asked for the cube; she just showed me she was suffering, and the simple fix was there all along in the wings I'd have binned. The freezer door opens a little more often now, and not only in heatwaves.

I've kept a spare pinch-pot in my own kitchen since, a quiet nod to the fortnight that taught me restraint. The neighbours laugh, but their fish is the healthiest on the street, and I sleep easier knowing the only thing I overfed that summer was my own presumption, not the grumpy orange thing in the tank.