| Sweetums | 01-26-2007 10:16 PM | We just went thru this for the last week with our Pookie. She is teething and would turn up her nose at her food. We tried everything. We got every dog food in every flavor to try on her. She'd try one for one meal and then turn her nose up at it next meal. Finally, I bought some ground lamb, which I cooked and she went for that. After a day or two when she got tired of it, we put a couple of bacon bits in each to give it a different flavor and that fooled her for a couple more meals. I wanted to put more nutrition into her besides straight meat, so we bought some baby carrots like someone else suggested and she thought it was some sort of chew and actually ate one. So she eats about 1/2 to one of those a day which also provides natural sugars. I think she especially likes it because it's cold and she's teething.
One other thing that worked was getting our cat to come into the kitchen and letting the cat eat part of her food. She gets very very interested in whatever the kitty eats, so then I sneak a chunk of the dog food off the plate the cat is eating from and place it on the floor between her and the cat. She gobbles it up, just because the cat likes it whether it's something she liked before or not. So weird! But then wolves which they are descended from do compete for food in the wild and I think that instinct still lives in dogs because they often get competitive with their food.
So if you have another animal which it sounds like you do, maybe just feed the other animal and make your picky little pup wait for it. That might just prime the pump. Is there any way that you can take extra time to come home at lunch if she doesn't eat in the morning, and feed your baby?
Also, our Pookie often gets nauseated in the morning when she hasn't eaten anything the night before. Apparently from other posts, I gather that's common. So we get her started by feeding her bits of rice cake in the morning. Then we go off and get ready and then try to feed her real food with the above methods after she's had time to digest the rice cake bits.
The other day, no kidding, I actually was tossing bits of meat on the floor and using my "go get it" voice like it was a game of fetch to get her to eat it. It did work, but I couldn't believe I actually had to go to such lengths just to get a dog to eat. |