I'm not going to stand here and pretend as though I know all the ins and outs of raising dogs correctly but I will say this much: I have had 3 dogs in my adult life and all of them have been very well behaved to the point where people often ask me how it is that they are such good dogs?
Many of my friends have dogs and some of them are good while others run around like wild shiftless hobo dogs that are completely uncontrollable. Whatever it is that I am doing, I am doing it right even though I don't really intentionally try to do things great.
One thing that absolutely annoys the hell out of me is when a dog is a picky eater and I will not tolerate that in my own animals.
We are taking care of a friend of mine's dog who has his quirks and is for the most part very calm - which is good - but he has one particular characteristic that is the fault of the owners and since he is years old, this problem will probably continue for the rest of his life.
On the right we have Nadi (my dog) and one the left we have Vader (not my dog.) When it comes to breakfast and dinnertime they are polar opposites of one another and it is actually one of the more difficult parts of my day. Nadi is thrilled to get really any food, whereas Vader seems content to starve rather than eat anything other than select prime rib cuts. This is not something I will cater to.
When chow time arrives in the morning and in the evening the process goes like this. Nadi will eat whatever I give her, which to be fair is a really expensive luxury dog food brand from France. It's not like I'm giving her Wal-Mart brand Ol' Roy to the tune of $4 for a 20 lb bag.
Vader has a bag of dog food that was provided for me and he will have nothing to do with it. The owner also provided me with containers of wet CAT food and told me that it is the only kind of food that he will eat.
I have a number of problems with cat food being fed to dogs and the main one is that it fucking stinks. My condo is not very big, just about 50 sq. meters, so simply opening this container in my house means that I have to air the place out for an hour afterwards. Then when I plop the bowl down in front of Vader, he will sometimes just lick it and be like "nah, not good enough."
Well, while I am not going to allow the dog to starve to death while his parents are away I am also not going to play this game. I had a dog with a similar attitude many years ago and I already know how to break them of this behavior. This strategy worked for me but I will not have Vader long enough for it to work on him.
When I put both of the dogs' food down on the ground, Vader has as much time as it takes Nadi to finish to get started on his own. If he fails to do this in that amount of time I take the food away and he doesn't get another chance at it until the next meal. So far, and I have only been watching him for 6 days at this point, he always eats it the 2nd time it is put down there 10 hours later.
I will not leave the cat food mess on the floor and allow Nadi to eat whatever he doesn't because since she has long floppy ears she drags them through whatever she is eating. That dog sleeps on my bed and I am not having a dog near my head whose face stinks of rotten tuna.
So Vader is probably eating about half the amount of food that he normally would be if his owners were in town. I have alerted them of this and they seem to have an attitude of indifference about it. Their exact response was "let him starve." This is an attitude that I kind of expected and of course they do not mean it. They are just aware of the fact that their dog isn't going to eat sometimes. This is a learned behavior though and one that different dog owners have different approaches to. I am not the kind of person that allows their dog to dictate what they will or will not eat. Either you eat what I give you (within reason of course) or you don't eat. It's as simple as that!
Nadi gobbles down her food in record time every time I give it to her and never turns her nose up at the food even though it has been the same stuff every meal for 6 years in a row. That's the way that a dog should be if you ask me.
What do you think? Would you cater to a dog's very choosy eating habits?