Feeding & Nutrition

The tin popped on the second night of the camping trip, the cheap kind of sardines in tomato sauce that cost sixty pence at the garage on the way up. I'd packed them as a joke for my own dinner, and Nell, my border collie, had never been within a mile of the sea in her whole life, so when the lid came off she lifted her head like the coast itself had spoken to her. Not a bark. A question. What is that smell and why is it not in my mouth.

I gave her one. Plain, out of the sauce, because the sauce was mostly sugar and she didn't need it. She took it like she'd been waiting for fish since before she was born, which is probably true of every collie that ever lived, and then she sat, and she looked at me, and for the first time on that trip she was not trying to herd the guy in the next tent or chase the string of a flag. She was offering me her full attention in exchange for the next sardine, and I am embarrassed it took me two days to notice the trade.

The rest of the holiday ran on fish. A tin split between her morning kibble and her evening training, the bones mashed soft so there was nothing to choke on, and she worked for me like a dog who'd found her purpose. Recall, which had been a suggestion at best, became a fact, because coming back meant a piece of sardine and the sea-smell on my hands. I'd read that oily fish is good for a coat, the omega threes, the thing every supplement tub promises for nine pounds a month, and here it was in a garage tin for the price of a packet of crisps.

When we got home I kept it up. A tin of sardines in spring water, once or twice a week, forked through her food. Not every day, because too much fish is too much of a good thing and the stools told me when I'd overdone it, soft and apologetic on the kitchen floor. The vet raised an eyebrow at first, the way they do, then nodded when I said plain and occasional and no salt. She said the coat would show it, and it did, by the autumn her black had gone blue-black, the kind of shine you only get from the inside.

I learned the limit the way you learn most dog limits, through the floor. Two tins in a day on a treat-heavy weekend and her stools went soft, and she looked at me like I'd broken the deal we'd just made. The fix was boring, back to one tin, split across two meals, and the lesson stuck harder than the smell, that fish is a topper, not a diet, and the shine comes from the regularity, not the volume. A dog doesn't need the sea every day. She needs it often enough to remember it was good.

On the last night of that trip I opened the final tin by the fire, and Nell sat closer than she'd sat to anything all week, the collie who'd ignored the lake, the river, the damp rope of seaweed on the shore, finally meeting the coast through a sixty-pence can. The man in the next tent asked if she was allowed fish and I said she was allowed this, and he laughed, and the dog ate, and the sea she'd never known became the best thing I'd ever packed, beating every toy in the bag.

People spend fortunes on toppers they can't pronounce. I spend ninety pence a week on a fish that smells like a pier. Nell doesn't care about the marketing. She cares that I opened the tin, and that the sea, which she'd never met, turned out to be the best thing I'd ever fed her.

What the camping trip actually taught me

The lesson wasn't about fish. It was about attention being a currency, and that the cheapest thing in my bag had bought the most of it. I'd been throwing her kibble from a scoop, boring, and wondering why she drifted off mid-walk. One smelly tin and she was a different dog, not because the dog changed but because the deal did. I keep a couple of tins in the camper van now, next to the torch. The sea goes everywhere with us, even when the sea is three hours away.

The tin still lives in the van, next to the torch, a small silver promise that the sea travels with us even when it doesn't. Nell is greyer now, slower on the hills, but the smell of a cracked sardine still stops her mid-stride and turns her into the collie who met the coast for the first time on a damp camping night, and I'll keep buying them, ninety pence a week, for the dog who'd never smelled the sea and decided it was the best thing I'd ever packed.