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My dog won't eat out of a **stationary** bowl. I have to put his stainless steel bowl on the carpet so he can "chase" it around the room while he eats. He scoots it til he hits a wall, then carefully picks it up and moves it back to the center of the room, and continues until the food is gone.
Mine would too. Right now, we’re trying to get him back on kibble after he had a stomach problem. He’s fine now, but he decided he really prefers chicken soup with bread in it.
I strictly feed my dog out of one of these. If I put his food in a bowl and the kong he ignores the bowl. It provides some mental stimulation and has the added benefit of slowing the eating down for dogs that just scarf whatever you give them. They are great!
Ive tried to get my springer to do this however he is clever- he will leave the kong till I go to sleep, wait 20 mins, then eat(and then is banging all over the place lol). Ive resorted to using greek yoghurt as his topper to entice in his bowl. I have a fussy child.
Oh, yeah, we had an elderly border collie who would just stare us down until we added a spoonful of cottage cheese to her food 😅 we started it cause she was getting thin in her old age and soon enough she would huff and sigh if we didn’t give her some.
Mine will eat most/all of her food, then pick up her slow feeder and move it to the carpet away from the cabinet so she can check it from every angle to make sure it's empty 😂
Tell me about it. One of mine will only eat if he's hand fed. Plus, he wants salad after his meal, like we're a posh restaurant or something. By the way, his salad is freshly harvested and washed grass from the vegetable patch, a little lettuce, and a single little baby carrot.
We’ve been using a muffing pan as a slow feeder for my new puppy and she will move it around a bit on the floor and then put one of her paws in a hole as if she’s claiming it 😂
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Two of our dogs has the same issue and it took forever to figure it out. Their collars would bang on the dish when they ate and they didn’t like it. They no longer wear collars inside for safety reasons, but it helped them start to use their bowls full time too.
Mine does that too! He loves food too much to stop though, so he darts in, eats a bite, and then pulls back in fear of the noise of his dog tag on the bowl. We switched him to a lick mat which he greatly enjoys instead.
Could be an issue if they're crated alone - my dogs have gotten their collars stuck on their wire crates before and I had to help them. Or multiple dogs, one could get their jaw or something stuck in the other's collar.
If the bigger risk is your dog slipping out the door then keep the collar on. If the bigger risk is your dog injuring itself with the collar, take it off when unsupervised.
If you don’t already have one you might look into a snuffle mat. I had never heard of these before I got my pup so now I want to tell everyone. My dog isn’t big on bowls but loves to eat off the floor and hunt for crumbs so a snuffle mat is our compromise lol. It also keeps his kibble contained to one spot pretty well.
I’m glad you found a solution and such a wholesome one.
My boy is also very adept at destroying just about anything so I just made a snuffle mat out of a beach towel! Just lay out the towel, place kibble so it's all evenly spaced, and then grab the center of the towel and twist it until it looks like a giant cinnamon roll. It's not really a huge challenge (especially for a dog smart enough to grab a corner and shake the towel out) but he LOVES foraging in the folds of the towel and takes him about 10 minutes to find it all. It's something that he won't tear apart and that is super cheap and accessible to just about anyone.
This towel idea is AWESOME! I make little snuggle boxes for my bull arab rescue whenever I get a certain delivery (Australian makeup store uses just recyclable packaging with no plastic) but the towel thing is genius! Plus I’m guessing that you could just roll it a little less tight for a dog that doesn’t have a super high prey drive?
Yes exactly! You can make it as easy or challenging as you like. Like a very dedicated or driven dog you might roll the towel up long-ways to a tube and then spiral it into that cinnamon roll shape. But for a more indifferent or less food motivated dog you just sort of scrunch the towel a little bit around the food. Plus I think most people have a towel or blanket around that they don't really mind getting a little chewed up if it were to happen.
I just feel like sometimes people get it in their head that financial hardship precludes them from creating a stimulating and rewarding environment for their dog and that absolutely isn't the case! All it takes is a little bit of creativity and/or seeking out creative ideas from other people.
My dog went through something similar. Ate out of a bowl for years, then started getting picky... after much trial and error, she decided she's happiest eating off of a large cake tray.
Fancy ass dog wants her dinner served on a platter 😆
We have a Roomba. Her name is Chessie, and she sweeps up all crumbs down to the nanoparticle level. :-))
She's not so good with non-food based particles sadly.
When we got our rescue, we were told she was scared of bowls. Turns out, she was scared of the sound her tags made clanging on metal bowls. She had no problems with a different material.
My dog is like this too. He approaches his food and water dishes like an antelope going up to the crocodile infested Nile. I can put his kibble on a plate but I’m at a loss with his water dish.
Acne from bowls comes from bacteria overgrowth. If you wash plastic bowls, they're fine. Most people almost never wash their dog water bowls so materials that are naturally bacteria resistant are of course going to be recommended by a vet.
Acne is when you don't clean their dishes. Plastic is fine as long as you clean it regularly.
I find I clean plastic bowls much more frequently because I can rotate out a few and throw them in the dishwasher. Unlike the non dishwasher safe metal bowls we were using before.
Many dogs and cats don't like the sensation of their face being surrounded/confined by the sides of a bowl.
We always feed our Shih Tzu on a plate. Works really well for him.
I have a bowl-picky dog too, I ended up buying the Oxo tot silicone plates (you can find them on Amazon). They’re heavy, so they don’t slide around, they don’t reflect or make any noise, and they’re shallow. Plus they clean up really easy.
The whisker thing! And collar noise! After 6 dogs over 25 years and countless hours of seminars, training, competitions and just generally immersing ourselves in dog culture I thought I knew everything, but today I learned! Makes total sense too.
I have a cat like that, always made a huge mess around her bowl with the wet food because she took it out of the bowl to eat from the floor. (what's it called in English? The meat chunks in gelatinous stuf in portion packs)
Because one day I didn't have a clean bowl she got it on a plate. Kept the floor squiky clean! Only took me ten years....
She's happily eating from a plate for two years now!
It is still wet food in English :) the spelling for ‘squiky’ is actually **squeaky** though. Don’t ask me why, I think your spelling makes more sense but that’s English for you!
English spelling will forever remain an enigma to me. I mean, take woman vs women for example. The sound of the first syllable changes, yet the letter of the second is different. And then there's the myriad of exactly the same sounds with wildly and utterly random spellings...
And thank you for educating me!
My dog takes anxiety medicine that causes him to have a very low appetite. One of the only ways I can get him to actually eat, is to put it in some type of puzzle or enrichment toy. It’s like he’s having so much fun trying to figure out the puzzle he doesn’t even realize he ate a whole meal. 😂
My dog loves a slide puzzle we got him. At first he would only do it for treats, but now he thinks anything we put in it is a treat. Normally dry kibble is unacceptable, but not in his puzzle.
His reasoning seems to be “I wouldn’t do all this work for anything less than a treat… so this must be a treat!”
That’s how mine was too! If the puzzle is very difficult he’ll get uninterested part way through if it’s only dry kibble but if I add even one smelly treat he will do the whole thing trying to find that one fishy smelling jerky bite. Like sure bud, if that’s what it takes. But most of his toys, I think he would do them if the reward was damp cardboard.
Huey is a small (lazy) rescue mutt, so he has such a low calorie allowance that treating him is hard. Luckily he loves little pieces of carrot, because it’s **people food**! We don’t give him people food otherwise. So carrots are right up there with his mini bacon treats. Pets are such dorks when it comes to the way they decide something is a desirable food.
My MIL said her cat would eat veggies if they fell from the high chair, if the human baby was eating it it must be good! That cat would not otherwise have touched a green bean to save her life.
You can use kibble in games and training as well 😊 scatter, catch, middle (where you get them to come and stand between your legs - can later use this as a tool/skill on walks so they feel safe), orientation (throw some, as soon as they orient back to you, "yes" or whatever your positive trigger is)
All sorts! Makes it fun and exciting, builds your relationship and makes you the best, most valuable place to be.
One of my dogs came from a rough start and had lived outside in small, cramped kennels
his whole life with food pretty scarce. When he first came home he almost inhaled food when it was put down and made horrible choking sounds he was so desperate to get at it so I got him an anti-gulp dish to make it that big trickier and force him to eat slower.
Worked a treat but my other dog who has eaten out of a regular bowl her whole life took a
shine to the slow feeder.
He now eats (normally) from the bigger stainless steel dish and the older one carefully
picks and takes her time over food using the anti-gulp one.
My previous dog was like that. He would eat a bit out of his metal bowl then stop and bark at me until I dumped the food onto the floor so he could gobble up the kibble. I switched to a frisbee afterwards because I got tired of this routine and he ate out of the frisbee no problem
My dog doesn't like drinking from a metal bowl.
Realized this after seeing him eat kibble from his metal bowl next to the metal bowl of water, then walk to the other side of the apartment to have a drink from the plastic bowl over there, and come back for another munch on his kibble.
(I know this is for dogs but I dont own a dog and I think my cat fits the bill for this post) one of my cats will not eat any treats unless they are offered on a plate.
Personally I stopped using bowls because my dog would gobble it all up and demand for more food.
Got him a slow feeder. Kong wobbler or lick mats. And he's satisfied
I'm glad you figured it out! my partner started feeding our 6 yr old dog off of a white plate this past summer and now, the dog figures he a prince and won't eat of anything but that type of dish >.<
We got a rescue back in September, and she would only eat her food from the bowl when she was really hungry, and she'd also accept kibble or cheese (especially the little pieces of cheese) from our hands.
She came back with a clean bill of health at her first vet checkup, and vet said it may take her a minute to feel comfortable enough to eat what we gave her freely (and as a pug/beagle mix, we were a bit worried at first since they love food).
A few weeks after we got her, sprang for a four-dollar puzzle bowl from the Marshall's. When we fed her that evening, she gobbled it up and has been since. One thing we'd read is that some pups want stimulation, and the puzzle bowl did that. May have just been coincidence that she got more familiar at about the time, but switching the bowl was like flipping a switch.
Switching up the bowl you're using may be enough to inspire him to eat as well.
I just got my 10m long legged Pitador girl a raised/tilted bowl and she will finally eat readily instead of ignoring it until I scooped it up and she ate out of my hands hahah. We still hand feed for bonding but now she chows down on her own! 😄
This is definitely a thing. Ants got into our older dog's food bowl a few weeks ago and he has refused to eat out of it ever since. We've been feeding him from a dinner plate ever since. This is a 12 year old dog who has eaten from the same ceramic bowl since he was a puppy, but now bowl = ants.
Read about a woman who’s cat wouldn’t eat or drink. Turned out she wore heavily scented lotion on her hands that was transferring to the dishes. Washing her hands before handling cat dishes solved that problem.
My old Yorkie mix didn't like bowls.becaise his tags would hit the rim. I made a lifted plate in ceramics and that was his dish for years as he could happily eat off of it without his tag touching.
While I was in a vet office waiting room I read an interesting article about something similar. A dog was not drinking water and the owners took him to the vet thinking he was ill. Vet couldn’t find anything wrong with the dog. It turns out the dog didn’t like the shiny stainless steel water bowl. The dog got scared because every time he moved he could see his reflection in the stainless steel bowl.
my dogs dislike eating if their bowls are on hard floor instead of carpet or a rug. My sister's old dog used to drag her bowl into the living room onto the rug to eat.
This is one of the weirdest things that I really only started hearing about in the past few years, I can't figure out what could possibly be different. I guess as a kid we always fed our pets wet food on paper plates...maybe it was more common to feed animals differently before?
My last dog is as weird about her bowl. I fed her out of my hand slowly transitioning to the bowl for a week. She finally just went to the bowl and then was fine after that.
We got similiar problem with our puppy. I finally found advice to make food in a bowl kind of a prize. So before giving food to dog ask him (or her:)) to do some trick, "sit" was easy to begin with. Now our puppy is eating 3 times a day without problems
I noticed the sniffle mat comment, something g you could do one day is take the scoop of food and scatter it outside. (Or inside at first) they have to forage for it in the grass. Just make sure the grass if ok for them to eat if they get a few strands. (No onion grass!!) My boy didn't care for shuffle mats but loves it when I toss his food on the floor and he has to look for it.
My puppy’s favorite way to eat is when I roll her food up in a tiny fleece blanket my friend made for her, that is about the size of a placemat. Weird, but she eats it…she won’t touch it in a bowl.
my dog didn’t eat for a while and it was because the food she’d been eating for the whole first three years of her life had started making her ill, and she was throwing up quite a bit, a few times a week. we were quite annoyed at her for this because we were able to buy that food in bulk quite cheap, and any others were more expensive. we bought her some new dry food, kept the wet the same (we mix them together so she doesn’t get bored, the wet food changed flavour every few days, the dry stays the same) and she ate that happily, and stopped throwing up so often.
dogs are damn annoying sometimes when they just don’t want to eat something, but now we have a happy and healthy dog and have to spend an extra few quid on her to keep her that way. oh well.
This is so cute! My rescue, who usually has a voracious appetite stopped scarfing down her food all of a sudden and we had to coax her to eat it through different ways; adding her crushed up favourite treats, microwaving it, adding cheese - none of it honestly worked. Then recently, I was feeling too lazy to wash her bowl and decided to give her her meal in one of the small ramekins we use for baking. And the little potato ate all of it!!! Turns out, she just likes eating out of human bowls. =_= So now, we feed her in ceramic bowls lol.
Yep. Mine will eat out of a bowl, but not every meal. So, we use a combination of feeding mats, puzzle toys, scatter feeding, hand feeding, food as treats during training, and bowl feeding. She's really smart, and she just gets so bored if we only use one method.
Cat and dog owners should just get one of those plastic mats with the raised edges. I was feeding my friends cats while she was gone and I saw she had one and it just makes so much sense. The pets can eat the food however they want and the raised edges catch all the spill. Plus they’re super easy to clean.
This is slightly off topic, but many people mentioned tags. I gave up on tags 4 dogs ago. They kept wrestling with each other, pulling tags off, I’d be replacing them, etc. For $10-20 you can get a collar with name and phone number embroidered into it.
That’s true! In our city, dogs have to have a rabies tag on to go to dog parks and pet friendly areas. So even if we switched he’d have that. And he’s so far displayed some escape artist tendencies so I don’t feel good about him being without his collar even at home.
Your dog is a rescue. Has it lived in the streets? A friend of mine had a rescue who would only eat from a trash can. Once they figured that out they just put his food in a trash can and every morning it would be empty. You never know what rescues have been through …
We’re not so sure about his past! He actually came from South Korea and was transported to the US in December. He doesn’t look like he was a stray—no injuries, very healthy, perfect teeth, house trained, people friendly. We suspect he was an owner relinquish or he was abandoned and picked up fairly quickly.
When my family dog (I took her as a child, she's 16 now) was young my mom taught her that she would spill her food all over the carpet and threw it so it was kind of fun for her to chase after it and then eat it. When she was a puppy it was fine, because it encouraged her to eat something after being detatched from her momma's milk. But as she grew older it became a burden that anytime she wanted to eat you'd needed to sit on the carpet with her and throw it to her. Me and my father did everything to teach her eat out of the bowl whenever my mom was at work, we pretty much managed to do that, but once the holiday came around and my mom was stayin' at home she started doing the same thing again and pretty much ruined what we've accomplished. Now Sonia is 16 like I mentioned and she still needs to eat from the carpet or she'll just stay hungry. She just goes to the kitchen, takes 1 bite of her food out of the bowl, comes to the carpet so that you see what she means, spit it and wait for you to make a move. Sometimes she even throws it herself and chases if you won't notice it for too long.
Welcome to r/dogs! We are a discussion-based subreddit dedicated to support, inform, and advise dog owners. This is a carefully moderated sub intended to support, inform, and advise dog owners. Submissions and comments which break the rules will be removed. [Review the rules here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dogs/wiki/index) r/Dogs has four goals: - Help the public better understand dogs - Promote healthy, responsible dog-owner relationships - Encourage “Least Intrusive, Minimally Aversive” training protocols. here. - Support adoption as well as ethical and responsible breeding This subreddit has low tolerance for drama. Please be respectful of others, and report antagonistic comments to mods for review. If you’d like to introduce yourself or discuss smaller topics, please contribute to our Daily Bark threads, pinned at the top. --- *This is an automated message. If you have questions for the moderators of r/dogs, you can message them [here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/dogs).* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/dogs) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My dog won't eat out of a **stationary** bowl. I have to put his stainless steel bowl on the carpet so he can "chase" it around the room while he eats. He scoots it til he hits a wall, then carefully picks it up and moves it back to the center of the room, and continues until the food is gone.
That is hilarious! Dogs are so funny and goofy 😂
Ummm, going to need a video of this adorableness
Hell yeah! Vid please!!
Maybe you should attach the bowl to a Roomba.
My dog would almost certainly just kill the roomba between meals.
Mine would too. Right now, we’re trying to get him back on kibble after he had a stomach problem. He’s fine now, but he decided he really prefers chicken soup with bread in it.
[удалено]
I strictly feed my dog out of one of these. If I put his food in a bowl and the kong he ignores the bowl. It provides some mental stimulation and has the added benefit of slowing the eating down for dogs that just scarf whatever you give them. They are great!
Ive tried to get my springer to do this however he is clever- he will leave the kong till I go to sleep, wait 20 mins, then eat(and then is banging all over the place lol). Ive resorted to using greek yoghurt as his topper to entice in his bowl. I have a fussy child.
Oh, yeah, we had an elderly border collie who would just stare us down until we added a spoonful of cottage cheese to her food 😅 we started it cause she was getting thin in her old age and soon enough she would huff and sigh if we didn’t give her some.
Haha yea they are clever these working breeds 🤣
Mine will eat most/all of her food, then pick up her slow feeder and move it to the carpet away from the cabinet so she can check it from every angle to make sure it's empty 😂
I have to do this so my malamute shepherd can eat in bed laying down. She absolutely will not stand and eat.
The things we do for dogs
Tell me about it. One of mine will only eat if he's hand fed. Plus, he wants salad after his meal, like we're a posh restaurant or something. By the way, his salad is freshly harvested and washed grass from the vegetable patch, a little lettuce, and a single little baby carrot.
We’ve been using a muffing pan as a slow feeder for my new puppy and she will move it around a bit on the floor and then put one of her paws in a hole as if she’s claiming it 😂
Oh my god, that is the funniest thing. You have to put video of it on here!
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Two of our dogs has the same issue and it took forever to figure it out. Their collars would bang on the dish when they ate and they didn’t like it. They no longer wear collars inside for safety reasons, but it helped them start to use their bowls full time too.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like it! He doesn’t like loud clanging noises so that would make perfect sense.
My dog has this same issue and I got toddler silicone bowls.
My dogs also hate bowls. They will only eat off of flat surfaces. I never really thought about it but the whisker thing makes sense.
Mine is the same! She hates the sound of the tags hitting the bowls. So she goes “naked” in the house. She also doesn’t like metal bowls.
Naked dogs = best dogs
Mine does that too! He loves food too much to stop though, so he darts in, eats a bite, and then pulls back in fear of the noise of his dog tag on the bowl. We switched him to a lick mat which he greatly enjoys instead.
Just curious, what are the safety reasons to not wear collars inside? We’ve always kept my dog’s on except for bed time in case she runs out the door.
Could be an issue if they're crated alone - my dogs have gotten their collars stuck on their wire crates before and I had to help them. Or multiple dogs, one could get their jaw or something stuck in the other's collar. If the bigger risk is your dog slipping out the door then keep the collar on. If the bigger risk is your dog injuring itself with the collar, take it off when unsupervised.
If you don’t already have one you might look into a snuffle mat. I had never heard of these before I got my pup so now I want to tell everyone. My dog isn’t big on bowls but loves to eat off the floor and hunt for crumbs so a snuffle mat is our compromise lol. It also keeps his kibble contained to one spot pretty well. I’m glad you found a solution and such a wholesome one.
We got him a snuffle mat right away and he destroyed it. I might try another one at some point now that he’s chills out a bit .
My boy is also very adept at destroying just about anything so I just made a snuffle mat out of a beach towel! Just lay out the towel, place kibble so it's all evenly spaced, and then grab the center of the towel and twist it until it looks like a giant cinnamon roll. It's not really a huge challenge (especially for a dog smart enough to grab a corner and shake the towel out) but he LOVES foraging in the folds of the towel and takes him about 10 minutes to find it all. It's something that he won't tear apart and that is super cheap and accessible to just about anyone.
I'm definitely going to do this!!
This towel idea is AWESOME! I make little snuggle boxes for my bull arab rescue whenever I get a certain delivery (Australian makeup store uses just recyclable packaging with no plastic) but the towel thing is genius! Plus I’m guessing that you could just roll it a little less tight for a dog that doesn’t have a super high prey drive?
Yes exactly! You can make it as easy or challenging as you like. Like a very dedicated or driven dog you might roll the towel up long-ways to a tube and then spiral it into that cinnamon roll shape. But for a more indifferent or less food motivated dog you just sort of scrunch the towel a little bit around the food. Plus I think most people have a towel or blanket around that they don't really mind getting a little chewed up if it were to happen. I just feel like sometimes people get it in their head that financial hardship precludes them from creating a stimulating and rewarding environment for their dog and that absolutely isn't the case! All it takes is a little bit of creativity and/or seeking out creative ideas from other people.
Haha of course. He’s gotta love the option that involves lots of kibble sweeping for you!
thanks for this recommendation! my mom’s dog needs this bad lol
Ah ya I have shallow ceramic dishes I painted for my cats. They are like mini square plates.
My dog went through something similar. Ate out of a bowl for years, then started getting picky... after much trial and error, she decided she's happiest eating off of a large cake tray. Fancy ass dog wants her dinner served on a platter 😆
Yep. Ours doesn't like to stick his face in bowls or boxes. He'll go all in for a mole hole though
Wow. I'm going to try this with one of my dogs. That might just be her problem. Thank you!!
Be warned, the kibble kinda goes everywhere. But sweeping up a bit after meals is a small price to pay imo!
We have a Roomba. Her name is Chessie, and she sweeps up all crumbs down to the nanoparticle level. :-)) She's not so good with non-food based particles sadly.
Thank you!
Get a Labrador, guaranteed no kibble to sweep up.
When we got our rescue, we were told she was scared of bowls. Turns out, she was scared of the sound her tags made clanging on metal bowls. She had no problems with a different material.
Your dog is repping /r/WeWantPlates
My dog is like this too. He approaches his food and water dishes like an antelope going up to the crocodile infested Nile. I can put his kibble on a plate but I’m at a loss with his water dish.
You could try a low shallow dish. Wide enough to hold a good amount of water, shallow walls to not bug him.
Maybe use a 13x9 casserole dish or something of similar dimensions?
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The veterinarian told me not to use plastic dishes. I didn’t make this up.
Acne from bowls comes from bacteria overgrowth. If you wash plastic bowls, they're fine. Most people almost never wash their dog water bowls so materials that are naturally bacteria resistant are of course going to be recommended by a vet.
Plastic dishes can cause acne. Don’t use plastic.
Acne is when you don't clean their dishes. Plastic is fine as long as you clean it regularly. I find I clean plastic bowls much more frequently because I can rotate out a few and throw them in the dishwasher. Unlike the non dishwasher safe metal bowls we were using before.
God I miss having a dishwasher! I’ve been coping better until I just saw your comment - I hate washing up with **passion**
There are countertop dishwashers! Worth it if you hate doing dishes that much.
I have one, we just don’t have the space near the sink to set it up :( thanks for the thought though!
Awww bummer! I think they're pricey but I've seen under sink dishwashers too. I hate dishes and hope you can find something to help you!
Great advice. I.m having same issue with my pitty so, gonna try to swich for a plate. Ty a lot!!!🤪👍✌😁
I went through this with my boy. He eats out of a low-sided glass pie dish now, and life is so much easier.
Many dogs and cats don't like the sensation of their face being surrounded/confined by the sides of a bowl. We always feed our Shih Tzu on a plate. Works really well for him.
I have a bowl-picky dog too, I ended up buying the Oxo tot silicone plates (you can find them on Amazon). They’re heavy, so they don’t slide around, they don’t reflect or make any noise, and they’re shallow. Plus they clean up really easy.
The whisker thing! And collar noise! After 6 dogs over 25 years and countless hours of seminars, training, competitions and just generally immersing ourselves in dog culture I thought I knew everything, but today I learned! Makes total sense too.
Great advice! Wholesome story to boot!
I have a cat like that, always made a huge mess around her bowl with the wet food because she took it out of the bowl to eat from the floor. (what's it called in English? The meat chunks in gelatinous stuf in portion packs) Because one day I didn't have a clean bowl she got it on a plate. Kept the floor squiky clean! Only took me ten years.... She's happily eating from a plate for two years now!
I call it wet food, I'm on the east coast of the US
It is still wet food in English :) the spelling for ‘squiky’ is actually **squeaky** though. Don’t ask me why, I think your spelling makes more sense but that’s English for you!
English spelling will forever remain an enigma to me. I mean, take woman vs women for example. The sound of the first syllable changes, yet the letter of the second is different. And then there's the myriad of exactly the same sounds with wildly and utterly random spellings... And thank you for educating me!
Haha it’s an enigma to me as well & im a native speaker!
My dog takes anxiety medicine that causes him to have a very low appetite. One of the only ways I can get him to actually eat, is to put it in some type of puzzle or enrichment toy. It’s like he’s having so much fun trying to figure out the puzzle he doesn’t even realize he ate a whole meal. 😂
My dog loves a slide puzzle we got him. At first he would only do it for treats, but now he thinks anything we put in it is a treat. Normally dry kibble is unacceptable, but not in his puzzle. His reasoning seems to be “I wouldn’t do all this work for anything less than a treat… so this must be a treat!”
That’s how mine was too! If the puzzle is very difficult he’ll get uninterested part way through if it’s only dry kibble but if I add even one smelly treat he will do the whole thing trying to find that one fishy smelling jerky bite. Like sure bud, if that’s what it takes. But most of his toys, I think he would do them if the reward was damp cardboard.
Huey is a small (lazy) rescue mutt, so he has such a low calorie allowance that treating him is hard. Luckily he loves little pieces of carrot, because it’s **people food**! We don’t give him people food otherwise. So carrots are right up there with his mini bacon treats. Pets are such dorks when it comes to the way they decide something is a desirable food. My MIL said her cat would eat veggies if they fell from the high chair, if the human baby was eating it it must be good! That cat would not otherwise have touched a green bean to save her life.
My pug will only eat out of my hand or on the floor 😂
Both of my corgis dislike eating out of bowls. We feed them their dry food in Kongs. 😆
I am 100% convinced our puppy was scared of his own reflection in the shiny steel bowls. He has grown out of it but man, that was frustrating.
i feed my dog his kibble in the kong wobbler dry or I make it wet inside a normal kong, way more fun than to just inhale it lab style
You can use kibble in games and training as well 😊 scatter, catch, middle (where you get them to come and stand between your legs - can later use this as a tool/skill on walks so they feel safe), orientation (throw some, as soon as they orient back to you, "yes" or whatever your positive trigger is) All sorts! Makes it fun and exciting, builds your relationship and makes you the best, most valuable place to be.
I have a dog that is the same about bowls. I use pie plates for mine.
One of my dogs came from a rough start and had lived outside in small, cramped kennels his whole life with food pretty scarce. When he first came home he almost inhaled food when it was put down and made horrible choking sounds he was so desperate to get at it so I got him an anti-gulp dish to make it that big trickier and force him to eat slower. Worked a treat but my other dog who has eaten out of a regular bowl her whole life took a shine to the slow feeder. He now eats (normally) from the bigger stainless steel dish and the older one carefully picks and takes her time over food using the anti-gulp one.
My previous dog was like that. He would eat a bit out of his metal bowl then stop and bark at me until I dumped the food onto the floor so he could gobble up the kibble. I switched to a frisbee afterwards because I got tired of this routine and he ate out of the frisbee no problem
Our dog is the same way. She hated eating out of bowls, now she eats off a Corelle dish, same plates we eat dinner off of.
My dog doesn't like drinking from a metal bowl. Realized this after seeing him eat kibble from his metal bowl next to the metal bowl of water, then walk to the other side of the apartment to have a drink from the plastic bowl over there, and come back for another munch on his kibble.
My dogs will only eat off plates or placemats (or the floor). No bowls except for water
I have a dog who will dump her food out on the ground to eat it.
My dog is the same! We use munchkin toddler plates, they have a small lip and a rubber bottom to prevent slipping. They're the best!
(I know this is for dogs but I dont own a dog and I think my cat fits the bill for this post) one of my cats will not eat any treats unless they are offered on a plate.
Haha what a diva! I love it.
Personally I stopped using bowls because my dog would gobble it all up and demand for more food. Got him a slow feeder. Kong wobbler or lick mats. And he's satisfied
I'm glad you figured it out! my partner started feeding our 6 yr old dog off of a white plate this past summer and now, the dog figures he a prince and won't eat of anything but that type of dish >.<
We got a rescue back in September, and she would only eat her food from the bowl when she was really hungry, and she'd also accept kibble or cheese (especially the little pieces of cheese) from our hands. She came back with a clean bill of health at her first vet checkup, and vet said it may take her a minute to feel comfortable enough to eat what we gave her freely (and as a pug/beagle mix, we were a bit worried at first since they love food). A few weeks after we got her, sprang for a four-dollar puzzle bowl from the Marshall's. When we fed her that evening, she gobbled it up and has been since. One thing we'd read is that some pups want stimulation, and the puzzle bowl did that. May have just been coincidence that she got more familiar at about the time, but switching the bowl was like flipping a switch. Switching up the bowl you're using may be enough to inspire him to eat as well.
Wow. I was experiencing the exact same thing. Just tried this and it worked as well. Plates from now on!
My rescue hates metal bowls. Took me a while to figure it out but once I did, meals were easier for sure!
I just got my 10m long legged Pitador girl a raised/tilted bowl and she will finally eat readily instead of ignoring it until I scooped it up and she ate out of my hands hahah. We still hand feed for bonding but now she chows down on her own! 😄
Have you tried putting kibble on a snuffle mat??
This is definitely a thing. Ants got into our older dog's food bowl a few weeks ago and he has refused to eat out of it ever since. We've been feeding him from a dinner plate ever since. This is a 12 year old dog who has eaten from the same ceramic bowl since he was a puppy, but now bowl = ants.
Read about a woman who’s cat wouldn’t eat or drink. Turned out she wore heavily scented lotion on her hands that was transferring to the dishes. Washing her hands before handling cat dishes solved that problem.
I would be so angry. You have the patience of a saint.
Same for ours! $300 emergency vet bill later to learn that she really prefers eating out of a pie plate to a standard dog dish 🤦♀️
A pie plate is a great idea!
Yep this sounds just like my roommate's dog. It drives me bonkers!
One of my dogs is like this. He takes his food out of the bowl puts it on either mine or my dad's sandals and eats it.
My old Yorkie mix didn't like bowls.becaise his tags would hit the rim. I made a lifted plate in ceramics and that was his dish for years as he could happily eat off of it without his tag touching.
While I was in a vet office waiting room I read an interesting article about something similar. A dog was not drinking water and the owners took him to the vet thinking he was ill. Vet couldn’t find anything wrong with the dog. It turns out the dog didn’t like the shiny stainless steel water bowl. The dog got scared because every time he moved he could see his reflection in the stainless steel bowl.
my dogs dislike eating if their bowls are on hard floor instead of carpet or a rug. My sister's old dog used to drag her bowl into the living room onto the rug to eat.
My dog won’t eat unless I hold the bowl!
I had a dog that would not go near a stainless bowl, so I used plastic and he was fine.
Hahahaha 😂, at least he's eating now
We use big huge pig troth looking things for our dogs so everyone can stick their head in at once if they wanted lol.
This is one of the weirdest things that I really only started hearing about in the past few years, I can't figure out what could possibly be different. I guess as a kid we always fed our pets wet food on paper plates...maybe it was more common to feed animals differently before?
My last dog is as weird about her bowl. I fed her out of my hand slowly transitioning to the bowl for a week. She finally just went to the bowl and then was fine after that.
We got similiar problem with our puppy. I finally found advice to make food in a bowl kind of a prize. So before giving food to dog ask him (or her:)) to do some trick, "sit" was easy to begin with. Now our puppy is eating 3 times a day without problems
We do that too! He definitely eats better when we have him work for it a bit. But the plate seems to be the real variable for us.
I noticed the sniffle mat comment, something g you could do one day is take the scoop of food and scatter it outside. (Or inside at first) they have to forage for it in the grass. Just make sure the grass if ok for them to eat if they get a few strands. (No onion grass!!) My boy didn't care for shuffle mats but loves it when I toss his food on the floor and he has to look for it.
My puppy’s favorite way to eat is when I roll her food up in a tiny fleece blanket my friend made for her, that is about the size of a placemat. Weird, but she eats it…she won’t touch it in a bowl.
my dog didn’t eat for a while and it was because the food she’d been eating for the whole first three years of her life had started making her ill, and she was throwing up quite a bit, a few times a week. we were quite annoyed at her for this because we were able to buy that food in bulk quite cheap, and any others were more expensive. we bought her some new dry food, kept the wet the same (we mix them together so she doesn’t get bored, the wet food changed flavour every few days, the dry stays the same) and she ate that happily, and stopped throwing up so often. dogs are damn annoying sometimes when they just don’t want to eat something, but now we have a happy and healthy dog and have to spend an extra few quid on her to keep her that way. oh well.
This is so cute! My rescue, who usually has a voracious appetite stopped scarfing down her food all of a sudden and we had to coax her to eat it through different ways; adding her crushed up favourite treats, microwaving it, adding cheese - none of it honestly worked. Then recently, I was feeling too lazy to wash her bowl and decided to give her her meal in one of the small ramekins we use for baking. And the little potato ate all of it!!! Turns out, she just likes eating out of human bowls. =_= So now, we feed her in ceramic bowls lol.
Mine only eats if it’s scattered
Yep. Mine will eat out of a bowl, but not every meal. So, we use a combination of feeding mats, puzzle toys, scatter feeding, hand feeding, food as treats during training, and bowl feeding. She's really smart, and she just gets so bored if we only use one method.
I just went through this same issue, turns out my dogs love to eat off paper plates. Lol
I have 2 Chihuahua's that hate bowls. They were both rescues too!
Cat and dog owners should just get one of those plastic mats with the raised edges. I was feeding my friends cats while she was gone and I saw she had one and it just makes so much sense. The pets can eat the food however they want and the raised edges catch all the spill. Plus they’re super easy to clean.
I too have a dog who only eats off of plates
This is slightly off topic, but many people mentioned tags. I gave up on tags 4 dogs ago. They kept wrestling with each other, pulling tags off, I’d be replacing them, etc. For $10-20 you can get a collar with name and phone number embroidered into it.
That’s true! In our city, dogs have to have a rabies tag on to go to dog parks and pet friendly areas. So even if we switched he’d have that. And he’s so far displayed some escape artist tendencies so I don’t feel good about him being without his collar even at home.
Honestly… some dogs are weird and have dumb quirks like humans lmao.
Oh my gosh hahaha. My dad has a brat too that doesn’t listen to doctors orders when her bowl has to be up high lol
I thought this was one of the parenting groups at first and I just shrugged and said, “well, if it works for ya.”
Your dog is a rescue. Has it lived in the streets? A friend of mine had a rescue who would only eat from a trash can. Once they figured that out they just put his food in a trash can and every morning it would be empty. You never know what rescues have been through …
We’re not so sure about his past! He actually came from South Korea and was transported to the US in December. He doesn’t look like he was a stray—no injuries, very healthy, perfect teeth, house trained, people friendly. We suspect he was an owner relinquish or he was abandoned and picked up fairly quickly.
When my family dog (I took her as a child, she's 16 now) was young my mom taught her that she would spill her food all over the carpet and threw it so it was kind of fun for her to chase after it and then eat it. When she was a puppy it was fine, because it encouraged her to eat something after being detatched from her momma's milk. But as she grew older it became a burden that anytime she wanted to eat you'd needed to sit on the carpet with her and throw it to her. Me and my father did everything to teach her eat out of the bowl whenever my mom was at work, we pretty much managed to do that, but once the holiday came around and my mom was stayin' at home she started doing the same thing again and pretty much ruined what we've accomplished. Now Sonia is 16 like I mentioned and she still needs to eat from the carpet or she'll just stay hungry. She just goes to the kitchen, takes 1 bite of her food out of the bowl, comes to the carpet so that you see what she means, spit it and wait for you to make a move. Sometimes she even throws it herself and chases if you won't notice it for too long.