If you haven’t seen the first blog post about feeding your puppy, you can go back and read it.
So when you’ve worked out that you have to take your part of the meal first, and your puppy has seen you do this you can put their food down onto the floor…
Be sure not to make any eye contact with the puppy when you do this. If you do it shows appears that you are giving them the food, whereas the idea is for you to take what you need and leave the rest, not give it up. You need to put it down and walk away.
Now the next stage is tricky and several people feel very differently about it. You need to start things as you mean to go on. As your puppy gets a little older, maybe 12-14 weeks or so, you need to not only establish your pecking order at meal times, but you also need to allow a certain time to eat. Now it is quite common for puppies to mess around with their food, only eat a little, and sometimes not bother at all; they are much more interested in what’s going on around them, and probably what you are doing.
This is where you decide to allow a certain amount of time for the puppy to eat its meal and if the puppy leaves it altogether you collect the dish from the floor and take it away until the next meal time. Pretty soon your puppy will realise that if it doesn’t eat at eating time, then it will go hungry and won’t eat at all. Believe me, it will work as long as you do the same as you did when you make them wait for their food; don’t look at them.
All these things might sound cruel but that is what it’s like in the animal kingdom, if they don’t eat at the right time, they don’t get it. And also all these lessons go towards asserting you as the alpha male in the home.
Tags: Puppies, puppy feeding, training