Please help. My dog hates dog food.
 

I have an 11 month old Yorkie. After reading a lot of the info on this site I am very grateful that my dog is quite healthy except for her diet. She has never liked dog food. I started her on HALO when I first got her and she would never eat enough of it for her age. I changed her to Blue Buffalo and she hated it. She actually runs away when she sees dog food. It is not that she is not hungry. She will try to get into the cat food and will gobble up any little bit she might find. I feed the cats on their own table where she cannot reach it but they sometimes push some off the edge and she will get it. She begs for human food and will bark at us for not giving it to her. In desperation I started making her food myself thinking she would think it was human food. Well, she liked it the first day and generally refused it ever since although sometimes she will eat some if I feed her by hand. I have been giving her some chewable supplements that she likes but am concerned that she is not getting the nutrition she needs. She is very active and loves to play and go for walks. I now have Taste of the Wild and she might nibble on a piece now and then but is not eating enough. I have tried the Taste of the Wild can food but she runs from that too. She weighs 4 pounds and is a little girl. I am so concerned about her future health because of he lack of proper nutrition. Is there anything I can put on her food to make her like it? I have tried things like chicken broth and beef broth from the foods I make her. She does not like cottage cheese or yogurt. I am so desperate that I pretend to eat her food to get her interested in eating it. She doesn't fall for it though. I would appreciate any suggestions.

You can try sprinkling a little parmesan cheese on it or mixing in some green beans or even peas or small cut carrots.

There's also The Honest Kitchen which is dehydrated food you can either sprinkle the crumbs on the food or make it into a gravy & pour that over it.

My brooklyn does the samething. He does not like his dog food either.I have nutro and pro pac het rather eat the food we eat. I feed him from my hand he eats alot but will not eat out of his dog bowl...

Yorkies are a notoriously picky breed. You have tried everything that I would have suggested. What people foods have you tried? How long do you leave a bowl of kibble out while giving her nothing else to see if she will eventually eat?

I'd be concerned that she is running away from some of it and the issue has gone on for so long. While likely just a behavioral thing, when was her last blood work? ALT, ALKP, BUN numbers? Have you ever considered bile acids testing to see how her liver is functioning? Liver compromised dogs sometimes refuse food because it makes them feel sick (and I uspose the same could be said for those with intestinal issues). Stool always formed and brown? Any vomiting?

She has vomited only about 4 times since she was a puppy. No diarrhea at all. I make sure there is no food down at night so she goes without anything available until morning. When we eat she begs for food. She is always hungry but refuses dog food. I make her a mix of chicken or beef with brown rice or sweet potatoes and vegetables. She will eat some if I hand feed her and having the cats act like they want it seems to peak her interest. It is just so frustrating and time consuming to do this and as I have said I am concerned about her long term health.
I can't leave the dry food down too long because the cats will eat it if I don't protect it. They love the Taste of the Wild food. Gracie isn't impressed with it. I have seen her eat a piece of two of it that is on the floor and not in the dish so I leave some on the floor and sometimes she will eat a few pieces of it.

Do picky eaters like the Honest Kitchen food?

my 3 picky eaters are finally eating
 

I have finally found a food all 3 of my Yorkies eat. I live in Fort Lauderdale, Fl and get it at a store (The Doggy Store) that is family owned (they have a 19 year old Yorkie plus 3 other dogs).
They designed it with a PHD in animal nutrition and it's called "Brothers Complete". Apparently it's so expensive to make they only sell it in their store directly to their customers (including me) but I understand you can order it at their Online store and they'll ship it for free. I must admit that I have learned quite a bit about dog nutrition from them. Their food was recently reviewed on DogFoodAdvisor and got the highest rating (5 stars). It has no grain or white potato (both seem to give my dogs stomach upset) plus it has digestive enzymes and special probiotics strong enough to survive the strong stomach acid of a dog. Another thing I think helps is that is has a coating of freeze dried liver. Whatever it is, my three rascals finally come running when I open the food drum. It took a few weeks to get all of them to finally realize they wouldn't get stomach distress from it and now the love it.

What would happen if you just put the dog food in the cats bowl? Any chance she would eat it? Wellness worked VERY well for my picky eater, and Innova too, although he doesn't eat it as eagerly it's been amazing for his stomach and he does eat it:) Good luck!

my dog goes crazy for the honest kitchen food... we used to feed him blue bluffalo and then switched to acana which he LOVED like crazy... until we started feeding him an honest kitchen sample pack for an occasional treat. Now he doesn't want the acana and will wait around for a little while to see if we'll give him some honest kitchen too.

my bentley is entirely grain free so we do the embark and he loves it. as im making it the dogs always follow me around the kitchen and sit until im finished.
they have 2 sample pack sizes and theres a bunch of different types... i'm thinking about switching bentley to it entirely but i worry that he needs something to chew and not just soft wet food all the time.

I went to The Doggy Store website to check this out. Apparently the Brothers Complete website is down right now. Maybe your post stressed the site! It sounds really good from the video I watched. I have noticed that a lot of the grain free foods do use white potatoes and I don't like that at all. They are not good for people to eat in large amounts much less put a dog on them daily. The Doggy Store does have samples available so I'm going to order them. My one concern is that it is rather high in protein. The thing is a food can have really great ingredients but if the dog will not eat it the ingredients are doing no good.
If my cats have not eaten in a few hours they will scramble to get the Taste of the Wild when I put it down. Gracie just watches them eat it and might grab a piece but that is it.
I wonder if there is anyway to get The Honest Kitchen samples? I have to order online as we have no local stores that sell quality dog foods.

Ziva is not a big eater and with 5 people in the house she wants people food. She will only eat dog food -TOTW- when there is nothing else in sight.She also liked Solid gold wee bits and could eat that faster when she got hungry.
She eats 1/3 c a day, 1 tsp cottage cheese, 1 tsp chicken or beef and a lot of that is in the evening when all other people food is put away, I feed her from a flat dish (corning ware sidekicks), in a room by herself- I sit down with a cup of tea and the newspaper and try to ignore her.Any distraction and the food is forgotten.

You can order hk samples on their website.

Madison has also become picky but she knows not to bark for human food since she's never been fed from our plates. That starts a horrible habit. Maybe try feeding the Natural Balance food roll. Canned dog food Madison LOVES is Merrick's Puppy Plate (looks and smells like human food!). I'll just take some kibble and soften it with hot water from the sink and mix it with the canned Merrick. It's gone in under 3 mins!

I buy Evengers for my girls and they love it. I get the chicken and sweet potato. You can go online to their website and see how it is made. It is a great dog food and their coats are really shiny. I know that the pet food stores in vegas have the samples you might try to contact the to see if you can get some of the samples. It is a human grade food. The site web site is evengers.com

Linda, Sassy and Patti

Someone else on here in a different post was saying that the new Nature's Variety LID dog foods are grain and potatoe free... that might be worth trying.
Also my Yorkie will NOT eat food from a bowl or plate or dish, so i just put on the floor.... maybe she's having problems with the bowl??? I know that sounds funny. Good luck... I would keep trying different foods.... I know how scary it is when they don't eat.... just remember she's little so she really probably doesn't need as much food as you think she does.

Gracie had blood work done when she was about 6 months old. My vet had wanted to do it sooner but I put it off as she was acting fine. When this dog food problem continued and got worse I took her in. Everything came back normal. She is not given people food or even doggy snacks, which by the way she likes, so as I said she is always hungry. The only way I can get some dog food down her is to hand feed what I make. If I offer her commercial food from my hand she refuses though. I am near to tears over this. Am sending for samples of other foods. I can't see another bag of food go to waste.

Thanks. I'll go there and order some. I ordered Natures Variety samples about a week ago. I have wasted so many bags of food I would rather try samples at this point.
I love this little dog dearly but she is very head strong and would like to be boss of the house. There is a lot of personality in that little body.

I'm glad you mentioned the Embark. I was unsure about which one to try to get.

Both my dogs were picky eaters. I stressed out over it until I spoke with a trainer, holistic pet store owner, and the vet...... their conclusions were, and this is almost verbatim... "there's no record of a Yorkie ever starving to death"

following their recommendations, I withheld food for one day. Simply did not put any food down at all (just water).

The next day, I fed 1/2 the recommended daily serving amount of a well balanced, nutritional dog food.

The following day, I fed 1/2 daily serving in the AM, and 1/2 in the PM.

I continued to follow that routine. If at any time the food was not eaten within half an hour, I picked it up. No snacks or treats until the next regular meal time. It took a couple days but it worked!

Now I've got an eager eater. Rarely is there a morsel left on his plate.

I would try dumping her food directly on the floor and see if she eats it. Mine will sometimes only eat when I dump the food on the floor, and there is another thread where several people said their Yorkies won't eat out of dishes.

Have you tried mixing it real chicken or some kind of other meat? I've never seen a dog turn down REAL chicken breast or REAL meat of any kind. I use canned food to mix with Jackson's kibble. He gets canned food mixed in real good with his kibble for breakfast and dinner but sometimes I have just regular chicken breast that I shred into his food, then I put a dab of water, stir it around so it gets on all the kibble, and he happily eats.

Also, alot of picky dogs LOVE raw food. Stella & Chewy's, Primal, and Nature's Variety come to mind. Worth looking into. :)

Your routine sounds much like mine except I let the cats help me. I take her in a room and let the cats follow. It smells good to them. I'll let the cats have some of the food while Gracie sits far away. She sees them eating and gets a little agitated. Then I give her some by hand and she will have a little as long as the cat is trying to get the food, too. It's just nuts. I think she prefers no dishes at all.

So far the canned foods I have tried she does not like. I have made her doggy chicken dinners and she will refuse them after the first dish. I guess she does not like leftovers. After I make a batch of food for her she will eat it but when I try to give her some the next day she refuses it. God help me. I have been considering Stella and Chewy. Sounds like what she needs. I know they make it for small dogs but I can't find a place that sells that particular one.

Protein content is generally regarded as too high when it is above about 32% and primarily generated from red meat. When meat is dried it generates ash and when there is above 32% red meat protein then the ash content begins to interfere with the absorption of minerals. If fish protein or dried eggs protein is used then a higher level of protein is OK because the ash content of these protein sources is less. This also applies to vegetable proteins.

To go back to the problem of finicky eaters there are a few things to consider. Grain and white potato cause acid indigestion because they have the effect of sugar on the dogs system. When dogs digest food their stomach acid can be as low as PH 1 because they were designed to digest raw meat and bone. We on the other hand have stomach acid of between 6 and 8 so a dog’s stomach acid is 10,000 times more acidic than ours. If we were to eat white sugar as 50% to 70% of our calories we would develop awful acid digestion in quick order. Imagine how bad it must be for our little carnivores with 10,000 times more acid in play. So the smart ones associate dry kibble with acid indigestion and train us to feed them something else – and rightly so.

The flip side of the grain/white potato problem is that dogs can become “addicted” to the sugar high even though it’s very damaging to their system. More dogs have diabetes per capita than people at this point, and the wolf population (which eats no grain or white potato) has NO diabetes. Since the Mitochondrial DNA (which determines nutritional needs, digestion and cellular energy transfer) of your Yorkie is 99.8% identical to a wild wolf then it makes sense to feed your dog a diet without grain or white potato. What makes our Yorkie’s small, cute and adorable little buggers is their Nuclear DNA which is what has been used to breed the different dog types over the years but their Mitochondrial DNA is still almost identical to the wolf.

A little known solution for finicky eaters can be found through a dogs capacity to perform a process known as Gluconeogenesis. This is a dog’s ability to transform fat into glucose. A dog will begin gluconeogenesis after not eating for about 20 hours and at that point they will feel fine physically because they will have all the glucose they need for energy. It was nature’s way of giving them energy so they could hunt even if they hadn’t eaten for a week or more. A recent example occurred after the Japanese Tsunami when they found a dog on a rooftop in a debris field ten miles out at sea after 21 days. He had water from rain but no food and thanks to gluconeogenesis he was fine.

So since my three boys were hooked on grain/white potato (sugar), because their dad hadn’t yet learned enough about nutrition, they were completely finicky about food and the worse it got the more I tried different things. After researching, studying, and researching some more I knew what I wanted in a kibble and actually found a grain/ white potato free food that also had digestive enzymes and probiotics out of sheer luck thanks to a friend. Brothers Complete. So I held my breath and implemented my new gluconeogenesis plan. I put a bowl of Brothers kibble down at night and if they didn’t eat it I picked it up. Each day I would put it down and pick it up. On the second day the youngest one ate and by the third day the other two joined him. It kind of reset their appetites and now they all come running at meal time. But I am also vigilant about not feeding them treats with grain or white potato in them as well. So in the end it really all comes down to who is going to train who. Will your dog train you – or will you train your dog?

ArmaniMan
I left a rather long post about the issues around high protein and how to reset your dogs eating habits the other day. Cathy97528 made a post that is similar to my point about how to reset your dogs appetite by simply waiting them out, only she did it much more succinctly. Yorkies are notoriously smart and manipulative and will train their owners at every chance they get. Be strong and remember YOU are the alpha dog.

i emailed them for samples... They sent me coupons , like 5, for one free can food or 2 dollars off a bag of food

I just received samples of the Brothers Original grain free food. Of course she refused it. I am going to try your suggestion. Up to this point I have been very afraid to let her go without eating for a full day. She is first class at begging. With several family members around I'm quite sure she gets crumbs here and there. I will police the place and make sure no one is giving in to her. She has managed to learn to jump up on the kitchen table. I have found her up there scrounging for food when she thinks everyone is gone.
Do you think sweet potatoes are OK for dogs? I have found she accepts food that I make with sweet potatoes better than what I make her with brown rice. I of course would prefer that she eat her kibble rather than having to cook for her.