Feeding & Nutrition

I am the kind of person who reads the back of a supplement tub and believes the bold print. So when our old spaniel, Clem, started taking the stairs one at a time and wincing at the top, I did what the internet told me and bought the most expensive joint chews on the shelf. They did nothing I could see, and they cost more than a week of groceries.

A friend who keeps greyhounds mentioned hemp seed, the kind you sprinkle, not the kind anyone gets excited about for the wrong reasons. She said it was cheap, it kept her old boy moving through winter, and it didn't come with a hero story on the label. I was sceptical but the price was right, so I bought a plain bag of the seeds and a small grinder.

The first morning I tipped a teaspoon over his dinner he looked at me as if I had finally lost the plot. By the third morning he was licking the bowl clean before the kibble, which for Clem is the highest praise he offers. I kept at it without expecting much, because I had been let down by pricier promises already.

What I noticed was not a miracle. It was small. He started beating me to the door in the mornings, where before he had waited for me to come back and coax him. The limp that had been there every cold dawn was still there, but it was shorter, and it warmed out faster once he was moving.

I asked the vet, because I am not clever enough to trust a trend over a professional. She said the omega fats in hemp were reasonable, that it was a fine thing to add, and that the bigger win was probably that I had finally given him something he enjoyed that also happened to be good for him. The honesty was refreshing.

By March the stairs were no longer a production. He still takes them carefully, and on wet days he is slower, but the grim set to his shoulders in January had relaxed into something like ease. I grind the seeds fresh now because the oil goes off in the cupboard, and the kitchen smells faintly of grass for about ten seconds each morning.

The bag lasts forever, which is the part I like best after years of buying small tubs of nothing. A spoon a day, mixed into whatever he is eating, and the cost works out to pennies. I have stopped apologising to him for the experiment, because he seems to have forgiven it.

Clem is thirteen now, which is a long time for a spaniel, and I have made peace with the fact that nothing I add to his bowl will turn back the clock. But the hemp seed taught me to judge a food by whether the dog wants it and whether he moves better after it, not by the promise printed above the barcode.

I still buy the occasional fancy chews, because hope is a hard habit to break, but the hemp stays in the rotation. The old dog votes with his bowl, and lately he has been voting early.

My partner doubted the whole thing, which is fair, because I have a history of buying the answer before I understand the question. She watched the first week of grinding with the expression of someone deciding whether to mention the expense, and then she started doing it herself on the mornings I slept in, which is how I knew it had quietly become ours.

The winter walks got easier to witness. Clem had been lagging, circling back to me as if unsure the legs would hold, and the lag shortened. We still turned for home when he told us to, because an old dog's limits are not a negotiation, but the turn came later and with less of the careful, apologetic pace he used to wear.

I took him to the vet in February mostly to be told off for something, and instead she ran her hands down his spine and said he felt looser than she expected for his age. I did not mention the hemp, then I did, and she wrote nothing down and only said keep doing what works, which from a vet is about as close to a blessing as you get.

The bag lives in the cupboard next to the coffee now, and the grinder has a permanent film of green dust that I have stopped trying to wipe. Clem sits by the cupboard at six, not begging exactly, just present, and I think of it as the most honest part of either of our mornings.

There is a photograph from January, Clem on the stairs, caught mid-step with his ears down and his whole body braced for the climb, and another from April on the same stairs, moving freely with his tail loose, and when I put them side by side even I, who doubted the hemp, could see the difference a season and a teaspoon had made.