A Dog's Dinner

There was a considerable panic to get to the stopcock this morning.

It is situated under the kitchen sink, inevitably behind many bottles. Mainly cleaning products, although it is also the repository for household things that are not food. Among them is a bottle of organic Baby Bio.

This particular Baby Bio is especially unpleasant. It is brown and particularly smelly and however carefully one tries not to get it everywhere, small amounts creep down the sides of the bottle so that wherever you stand it, it leaves a brown ring. Under normal circumstances I take this into account.

These were not normal circumstances. There was a risk of flooding and a rapidly diminishing window in which to prevent the need for a life raft. I hauled everything out from beneath the sink and put the Baby Bio on the floor.

Once the water-related emergency was under control, I discovered that the dog had taken an interest in the bottle.

There are moments in life with dogs when you find yourself looking at what has attracted their attention and wondering whether there is, in fact, any substance on earth which they will dismiss immediately as not food.

I don't mean that dogs will eat anything. That is an accusation frequently levelled at them and it isn't entirely fair. What fascinates me is the breadth of material they are prepared to consider. Eating can come later. First there is the investigation, the sniff, occasionally a tentative lick, while the possibility is assessed. The fact that something is plainly not food, has never been food and was manufactured for a purpose entirely unrelated to food does not seem to exclude it at the preliminary stage.

We have, for example, beeswax.

There are also Bobby's buttons, the little hooked fruits of sticky willy, which is apparently what we have collectively decided to call a perfectly respectable plant. There is chicken poo too, which has at least been through a chicken but seems an unnecessarily generous interpretation of the farm-to-table movement.

Other items have a more defensible claim. Carrots are unquestionably food, and I can't reasonably object to those. Butternut squash skin has at least spent its existence wrapped around food. Stale bread put outside for the birds is food too, although this raises the separate question of whether a dog understands that anything edible can have been allocated to somebody else.

The answer appears to be no.

The same principle operates in the kitchen. Any crumb reaching the floor is dealt with immediately, but it isn't necessary for anything actually to fall. There is usually a dog waiting beneath the chopping board on the reasonable assumption that sooner or later gravity will provide. This is not scavenging so much as investment. The dog has identified an area of historically reliable returns and is prepared to wait.

Then there are the apples.

We have a great many fallen apples, and I have been able to observe that the attractiveness of an apple to a dog bears almost no relationship to its condition. A newly fallen specimen, still crisp and wholesome-looking, presents no mystery. I might eat that myself. But the interest continues through bruising, softening and fermentation and well into decomposition, long after the apple has ceased to resemble anything one would willingly bring into a kitchen.

There seems to be no agreed point at which an apple becomes too far gone. What I regard as a rotting piece of vegetation appears to remain, in canine terms, an apple.

Blackberries are more impressive because they require effort. They aren't waiting helpfully on the ground. The dogs remove them very gingerly from the brambles, negotiating the thorns to get at individual berries. This careful exercise in self-provisioning would be rather charming were it not for the spaniel's tendency to emerge carrying an entire network of brambles in its ears.

All of this came to mind recently when I read an article warning dog owners about autumn. The season, it turns out, lays out something approaching a carpet of things capable of poisoning a dog. There are acorns and conkers, various berries and fungi, rotting fruit and other seasonal hazards, all arriving at precisely the height occupied by an animal whose first response to an unfamiliar object is quite likely to involve its mouth.

This seems an extraordinary design flaw.

Dogs have lived alongside us for thousands of years. They can detect substances in concentrations we cannot begin to perceive. They can distinguish individuals by smell, locate things buried underground and apparently identify that somebody three streets away has opened a packet of ham. Yet confronted by an unidentified object in a hedge, the sophisticated sensory equipment seems sometimes to produce the conclusion that the best way of obtaining further information would be to eat it.

Perhaps this is simply what comes of being an omnivorous opportunist. From a dog's point of view, excessive caution might historically have meant missing lunch. The successful strategy may have been to regard the environment not as a collection of food and non-food but as a collection of possibilities.

It would explain quite a lot.

It would certainly explain why the category can apparently stretch from carrots to chicken poo, from fresh apples to ones slowly returning to the earth, from blackberries delicately harvested among thorns to the residue on a bottle of organic plant fertiliser.

I did not, incidentally, allow the Baby Bio experiment to proceed far enough to discover what the final decision would have been. I removed the bottle.

But there had been consideration.

And I am beginning to think that this is the distinction. Humans divide the world fairly confidently into things that are edible and things that are not. Dogs seem less interested in imposing that sort of premature certainty.

Everything deserves a hearing.

Except, of course, the meaty-flavoured pill from the vet.

Present a dog with one of those and the animal which has just eaten chicken poo will object spectacularly.