Free Feeding

Author: Denise Partlow

Instagram: @modernk9 Carolinas

Yes. Yes it is. But why?

When we leave food out for our dogs to eat whenever they want, however much they want, it leads to problems in the future.

Here is why I choose not to free feed my dogs:

1- My dog won’t see me as the provider of this food…. To me that is a problem because I want my dog to see me as the source of all goodness.

2- I am communicating to my dog that this food is free and they need to do nothing to earn it. This is a problem because it creates a dog who decides when he wants to work for me and when he doesn’t creating unreliable obedience.

3- This makes training my dog really difficult due to lack of motivation- why bother to work for food when he can get it for free. This is when we say the dog is not food motivated.

4 -Free feeding can create a picky eater, which can cause a lot of anxiety in many dog owners as we get nervous when our dogs won’t eat. The result, we introduce all different kinds of foods just to get our dog to eat something!!! Dogs then pick up on this pattern and will hold off for something more valuable. They will eat it for a while until they decide they are tired of it and will repeat this pattern.

5-When dogs stop eating, that is usually a big indicator that something is wrong but when our dogs are always turned off by food, it can make it difficult for us to detect an illness.

6-Lastly, for some dogs this can create obesity because we are not giving the correct serving size but rather just filling up the entire bowl whenever it is empty.

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