Feeding & Nutrition

The toilet lid was always down. He still found a way. Somehow the seat, the gap, the lean over the rim, my collie had it sorted, and every time I walked into the bathroom there he was, neck craned, tongue in the bowl, looking at me like we'd both agreed this was normal. We had not. I'd agreed nothing. He'd agreed everything on his own.

I tried the obvious. Bowl by the bowl, fresh water, cold from the tap, changed twice a day. He sniffed it, looked at the toilet, and went for the toilet. A dog will tell you what he wants if you watch, and mine wanted the coldest, strangest water in the house, the one with the rim he had to work for, which is either defiance or taste, and with a collie it's usually both.

The vet raised an eyebrow when I mentioned it, the same eyebrow she raises at most of my habits, and said still water goes stale, dogs know, and a moving bowl is what they'd pick in the wild, a stream, a tap, anything that isn't a still puddle they can see the dust floating in. I'd read that. I'd ignored it. The toilet was the stream, apparently, and the bowl was the puddle, and he'd made his choice clear.

So I bought a fountain. The cheap one, plastic, the kind that hums on the worktop and you pretend not to hear. Twenty quid, a filter, and a pump that pushed water up a ramp so it fell back down like a tiny incompetent waterfall. I set it in the kitchen, filled it, plugged it in, and waited for the revolution that did not arrive on day one.

He ignored it for a day. Then he drank from it. Then he camped by it, the way he'd camped by the toilet, except now the water was filtered and the bowl was clean and I didn't have to bleach the rim he'd been licking. The moving water did what the vet said it would. He drank more, the way a dog drinks more when the water is cold and alive, and the toilet lid stayed down and untouched, a small win I felt smug about for a week.

The fountain needs looking after. The filter clogs, the pump gurgles when it's low, and you learn to top it up without thinking, the way you learn to feed him. But the cost of a filter a month beats the cost of a dog who thinks the bathroom is a water source, and the hum, which I pretended not to hear, became the sound of the house having a drink, which is softer than it sounds.

He's sleeker now. Coat, the vet said, water shows in the coat, and a dog who drinks properly has a different kind of shine, less about oil and more about health, and I'll take the boring truth over the fancy supplement any day of the week. The fountain paid for itself in the first month, in kibble he didn't waste and water he actually drank, and the toilet became a toilet again, which is what it was for.

I keep the bathroom door shut now out of habit, even though he's forgotten the bowl in there. Old dogs, old habits, but the new one stuck, the fountain, the hum, the cold clean drink he chose over the weird one, and that's the trick with a stubborn animal, you don't argue, you give him a better option and let him think it was his idea, which with a collie it always was.

The youngest tried to drink from it once, on a dare from his brother, and I caught him and told him it was the dog's, and he said it looked cleaner than the sink, which is the highest praise a fountain ever got, and possibly the lowest the sink ever got, and either way the collie won, the toilet lost, and the house smells less of bleach and more of a dog who finally has a drink worth having.

The filter is a fortnightly job, the kind you forget and then hear the gurgle and remember, and the gurgle is the dog's water complaining, and I top it, rinse it, and the hum resumes, the small sound of a house with a drink in it, and the toilet, which was the drink for a year, is just a toilet again, the lid down, the dog uninterested, and the interest moved to the fountain, where it should be, a clean cold moving thing a collie picked over a bowl he was offered and a rim he earned.

He drinks more in summer, the fountain works harder, the warmth makes him thirsty the way it makes everyone thirsty, and I watch the level and learn his days, the hot ones, the lazy ones, the walk ones, and a dog's water is a diary if you read it, and the diary now reads clean, which is the point, that the toilet chapter is closed and the fountain chapter is open and the vet, who raised the eyebrow, lowered it, and the lowered eyebrow is the highest praise a fountain gets.