What’s the Best Way to Feed Your Dog?
Is it better to leave food out all day, or to feed your dog separate meals?
Jolanta Benal, CPDT-KA, CBCC-KA
Listen
What’s the Best Way to Feed Your Dog?
We in the developed world are used to having food around all the time, and to eating whenever we feel like it. Maybe that’s why many of us leave food in our dogs’ bowls all day long. Unless your vet recommends such free feeding for your individual dog, there are good reasons to feed your dog regular, separate meals instead. You might even want to get rid of your dog’s bowl altogether.
Here are 4 reasons why scheduled meals are better than an all-you-can-eat buffet:
1. Regular Meals Make Housetraining Easier
Housetraining success depends on giving your puppy enough opportunities to pee and poop in the right place at the right time. “The right time” is, of course, whenever she might need to pee and poop. If you know when the food went into one end, you have much better odds of predicting when it’ll come out the other end. Say you’ve taken your puppy out for a toilet break and she has peed. If you have no idea when she last ate, you’ll have no idea whether and when she also needs to poop — which makes it much more likely that she’ll have an accident on your living room floor. Not only is this no fun to clean up, but also every time your puppy eliminates indoors, she’s learning the lesson that indoors is where to go.
2. Regular Meals Help You Keep an Eye on Your Dog’s Health
Maybe it’s time for your dog’s regular checkup, or maybe you’ve brought her to the vet because she seems a little under the weather. “How’s Dogalini’s appetite?” Dr. Doolittle wants to know. Keep Dogalini’s bowl topped up all day and you won’t know.
Speaking of your dog’s health, dog food is a pretty good medium for growing bacteria. So even if I don’t convince you to give your dog distinct meals, please toss the leftovers and wash that bowl with soap and hot water at least twice a day.
3. Regular Meals May Help You Manage Behavior Problems
If you have two dogs and one of them tends to push the other around, always getting the bone and eyeballing the other dog off the comfy bed, the pushier dog may also be hogging the food you leave in a communal bowl. He may even be bullying the other dog away from the food. As part of your long-term plan to manage the dogs’ behavior, feed them regular, separate meals. That way you can be sure the less assertive dog is getting his share of the food, and the more assertive dog isn’t being rewarded for food hogging.
4. Regular Meals Help With Training
If you feed your dog regular meals, you know when he’s hungry. If you know when he’s hungry, you can give yourself a huge leg up on training. Train when your dog’s hungry, and food will be more valuable to him. Often, when a client tells me that his dog won’t work for food or isn’t interested in food, it turns out the dog’s bowl gets refilled all day long. That dog is like a person with a fat trust fund—of course he doesn’t feel any particular need to exert himself to earn more money.
If you feed your dog regular meals and work with him at times when he’s hungry, you can use his usual dry food as training rewards. Or better yet, use a premium dry food, if that’s not what you normally give him. If you use a good dog food as a basic reward, you don’t need to worry about unbalancing his diet, which is especially important for puppies and small dogs because with a small intake it’s easier to throw off the nutritional balance. If your dog has food sensitivities, you may need to use his regular food for training and make the best of it, so it’s all the more helpful to work when he’s a bit peckish. Using a premium dry dog food in training can even save you money, since good-quality commercial treats are hair-raisingly expensive.
Or Just Throw Away the Food Bowl
Hand feeding can promote bonding between you and your newly adopted dog, and it’s commonly recommended to help prevent food-bowl guarding when you raise a puppy, too. But some people never feed their dogs out of a bowl at all. Ambitious and diligent trainers can wind up using all of a dog’s food for training rewards. A food bowl may be redundant if you’re working with a “Say Please” or so-called “Nothing in Life Is Free” program.
Or suppose you have a high-energy dog who loves to chew. Use some of her food as training rewards, the better to tire her brain, and deliver the rest in safe, chewable food-dispensing toys to relax her and occupy those busy jaws. This tactic also works well for dogs recovering from surgery, being treated for heartworm, or otherwise on “medical leave” from aerobic exercise.
Unless there’s a medical reason your dog needs uninterrupted access to food, both of you will benefit if she gets regular, separate meals instead—and not necessarily fed out of a bowl, at that. One more point about food: A lot of dogs spend a lot of time just plain bored. The more you use your dog’s food for reward-based training or deliver it in food-dispensing toys, the more interesting you make her life, and the more strongly you establish yourself as important and worth paying attention to. In turn, you not only make training easier but also deepen your bond.
Have you switched your dog from an all-day buffet to scheduled meals? Tell us about it in Comments.
That’s all for this week. You can follow The Dog Trainer on Twitter, where I’m Dogalini, as well as on Facebook, and write to me at dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email. I welcome your comments and suggestions, and I may use them as the basis for future articles. Thank you for reading!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Jolanta holds professional certifications in both training and behavior counseling and belongs to the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She also volunteered with Pet Help Partners, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that works to prevent pet relinquishment. Her approach is generally behaviorist (Pavlovian, Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian learning theory) with a big helping of ethology (animal behavior as observed in non-experimental settings).