Feeding & Nutrition

I spent three quid on a box of quail eggs as a joke. The market stall had them next to the honey, tiny speckled things the size of a grape, and I told the seller I didn't even have a dog, which was a lie, and she laughed and put six in a bag anyway. At home I held one up to the light and my spaniel, Burt, looked at it the way he looks at every small object, which is to say he assumed it was food and sat down hopefully. So I cracked it over his dinner. That was the whole beginning.

He liked it. Of course he liked it. Raw egg on kibble is the kind of thing dogs have been eating for longer than kibble has existed, and Burt is not a dog who questions the old ways. I did it again the next day, then the next, until the six were gone and I was back at the stall asking for a dozen like a person with a plan. The seller grinned and said she'd known. I didn't tell her I still had no idea if it was doing anything.

Here's what I'd read, in bits, before committing. Eggs are a near-complete protein, the yolk is full of fatty acids and the kinds of fats that show up in a coat, and the shell, ground fine, is calcium. People worry about salmonella and biotin, the old warnings, but the dose of one tiny quail egg over a bowl of proper food is not the daily-raw-chicken risk the panic is about. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm a person with a dog and a stall and a habit, and I ran it past the vet before it became a thing, which is the part I'd tell anyone to copy.

The vet was unbothered, said eggs were fine in moderation, asked how many, and when I said one quail egg a day she nodded like that was barely worth noting. What she did note, two months later at the spring check, was his coat. Burt is a liver spaniel, the kind whose colour goes flat in winter, and she ran a hand over his side and said something had changed, what was I feeding. I told her about the eggs and she wrote it in his notes like a confession.

I'm not claiming the quail egg did it alone. He'd also started on a better oil, the walks were longer as the light came back, and a dull winter coat brightens with spring the way a lawn does. But the shine arrived early, before the weather turned, and the only new variable in his bowl was the speckled egg I cracked without thinking. Correlation, the scientist in me says. The dog in me says crack the egg.

They're fiddly, I'll be honest. Quail eggs are small and the shell is thin and you waste half of one learning the crack, and a box of a dozen costs more than a week of his kibble top-up used to. But the ritual stuck because Burt stuck to it, waiting by the fridge each morning like the egg was the point of the meal and the kibble just the vehicle. A dog who gets excited about one small thing will teach you to keep showing up with it.

I tried chicken eggs after the stall closed for a fortnight, one quarter of a yolk, and he ate them fine but the shine dipped, or I imagined it did, which is the danger of a habit you've decided is working. The quail went back on and so did the gloss, and I stopped trying to be rational about a three-pound box of speckled eggs that makes my dog's coat look like someone polishes it.

What I'd tell a friend is this. Don't overhaul your dog's diet on a whim and a market stall. Ask the vet, keep the rest of the food boring and complete, and treat the egg as the garnish it is, not the meal. A quail egg is a nice thing, a fatty-acid thing, a small joy thing. It is not a cure and it is not a replacement, and the dog who thinks it's the best part of his day is probably right.

The box is on my shopping list now, permanently, next to the honey I never bought. Burt gets his egg, the seller gets her regular, and the coat shines into another spring. A joke that turned into the cheapest routine either of us has.

The seller at the stall asks after him now, calls him the egg dog, and saves the small box for me without being asked. It's a strange little bond, built on six speckled eggs a week and a dog she's never met, but that's country markets for you, everyone knows your dog before they know your name. Burt, for his part, has no idea he's famous at the honey stall. He just knows the bag means a crack and the crack means the best part of breakfast, and a spaniel asking for nothing more than that is a spaniel easy to keep happy.