Here at Down Dog we advise all our clients that dogs should not be fed from bowls. I talked last time about how important it is that dogs get a good, balanced diet, and how to help fussy eaters eat and actually enjoy their food.
But it benefits all dogs to have most of their food fed in ways other than in a bowl, especially if your dog has any sort of behaviour problem. Food is a simple, easy to use reward for training, where, rather than giving a commercial dog treat, many of which are of poor nutritional quality, you can use your dog’s own regular food instead.
Using your dog’s own food means you won’t unbalance their diet. It means you can monitor their intake closely which can help if your dog has weight problems or needs building up. And it avoids over-feeding, because you can measure out the daily ration of food each morning to use throughout the day, for short training sessions or in food toys.
For training at home, use just your dog’s normal food. Kibble is easy to use, but you can use raw or wet food too, either chopped or rolled into tiny balls or fed tiny bits at a time from a teaspoon.
You can make your dog’s own food more special for training out and about when you need to, by mixing it with a few pieces of ham, or chicken, or liver, where the kibble takes on the flavour of the added extras, and the surprise of sometimes getting a tiny piece of chicken or ham adds to the reward for your dog.
The act of giving a piece of food is the reward. The size is immaterial, which means that you can use tiny pieces, no bigger than around half the size of your little fingernail.
If your dog has any sort of behaviour problem, I’ll recommend a programme where you’ll use food to change your dog’s emotional state about something (the technical term is classical and counter conditioning). For this training, you might give around 100 pieces of food in each training session, so tiny pieces are vital, especially for small dogs who don’t eat much food.
And if at the end of the day there is some food left over from the amount you measured out, you can use it in so many other ways than just putting it in a bowl.
- Hollow chew toys that can be stuffed with food, such as Kongs, teach your dog to settle down alone.
- These can be frozen, too, adding to their value
- Snuffle mats and lickimats slow down eating time and link food with natural behaviours dogs love to do, which again increases the value of the food
- Lay food trails or hide food for your dog to scavenge. There are more ideas in our free help sheet on the website.
Daughter no 1 is now feeding Pepper the new puppy in these ways. She’s hand feeding at “mealtimes” and linking this with some basic control training. She leaves Pepper with a filled Kong when she leaves him. She uses a mix of kibble and ham for training recall out and about.
Change how you feed your dog.
Ditch the bowl and make food fun.
To learn all sorts of fun games to help train your dog to do what you want, come and join our courses in August. There’s our signature course, our Perfect Pet course, or we also have our Masterclasses, one on teaching your dog to walk nicely on a loose lead and one on recall. All the details and booking can be found on the website, https://www.downdog.co.uk
We’d love to see you there.
Keep training and keep safe,
Carol