My dog is hungry

[Deadnettle]

So she is pushing her food bowl around the kitchen floor.

Her bowl is full.

The food in her bowl was fresh this morning and she has had it before and eaten it. She just doesn't want it.

Please tell me I'm not the only person with a dog who would rather make themselves sick with hunger than eat something they like but don't fancy right then?

One of mine was like this when younger,we tried different dishes & all kind of tricks,different foods etc.
Little sod would eat it if we hand fed him though!

In the end it seemed to be an attention tactic , he is real character,very clever & funny in his ways.

What breed is he op?

I have a terrier that will do this. She eats eventually 2 or 3 days later, I don't worry about it so long as she's drinking and is her usual bouncy self.

She is a miniature poodle.

She doesn't do it for attention or if she does its never worked!

She will only eat if she is hungry, but gets bored of food very quickly. So if she has something for breakfast that she loved she might not touch it at dinner. This applies to treats too.

She has literally make herself sick with hunger despite the fact she has been a foot away from food she had previously deemed edible. Unfortunately she will eat anything (other than food) when she gets too hungry which is dangerous and expensive so we can't just wait her out forever.

Yes Eric would rather starve than eat something he doesn't fancy, it drives me mad. It's not helped though by dh being a sucker for his sad faced, starving, pathetic hound look and raiding the fridge to feed him something else instead. I'm much more hard hearted and would sit it out until he gave in.

As well as taking it from my hand he'd eat a bit if we put it on the floor then still ignore the rest in his dish.

Who knows what goes through their complex doggy minds....my other dog is nicknamed "the crumber" he hoovers everything up that looks remotely edible.

Eric's half poodle isn't he? Maybe its a poodle thing.

Our dog gets some tiny bits of treat to hold off the hunger pukes and the eating of non food stuffs and then she is left to eat her food or not.

My poodle used to do this. I'd get halfway through a bag of different varieties of good quality kibble and she'd refuse to eat it. She hasn't any spare fat to lose though so after a couple of days she would look too skinny. I ended up switching to raw and she has never, ever left a meal since.

We sadly don't have the space to feed raw anymore, although it is something we have considered doing again (we raw fed a previous dog).

I am impressed you managed to get though half a bag of kibble before your poodle refused to eat it, mine refuses after 1 meal!

1 meal! Oh god, that must be a nightmare. I've had to buy a separate freezer just to store dog food so I know what you mean about space! There's no way you can do it really without a big enough freezer. What about the wet food trays like Wainwright's from Pets At Home?

What about Nutriment Deadnettle?
Mine have a bit of the salmon or Turkey variety on top of their Millies or occasionally a full meal of it.
You can get it in 500g tubs.

She eats wet food more than dry, but even then its hit and miss. Mostly miss.

Wet food she has tried include Wainwrights, fishmongers (she didn't eat any), forthglade, applaws, james wellbeloved, meatlove/fleischeslust and others that I can't remember right now. She won't eat fish (but fish skins are fine), or lamb.

She will eat it (sometimes) seems to love it and then will never touch it again. She is costing is a fortune and the waste is awful. We give away more food than she eats.

Can't remember if we've tried nutriment, I'll add it to the list.

Thought I should say that I'm not worried about her weight, she is thin but not too thin so she is getting enough food. He weight hasn't changed since she was 8 months old in february.

I just want to be able to put food down for her and have her eat it!

What about scatter feeding her?

If my dogs didn't want to eat but we're hungry, if i dropped a few bits of kibble on the floor, they wolfed it down and begged for more

We've tried that sadly.

We've also tried stuffing kongs with her meals but that didn't work either. If she doesn't want to eat then she won't eat even if she is hungry. This applies to treats too.

Yes he's half poodle too and apparently his poodle dad is just the same. Eric does the one meal and then refuse too. I rotate his foods and sometimes have success there and quite often feed him leftover meat and raw veg from our dinners which works at times too. He must be the only dog though who turns his nose up at steak, chicken and lamb when he's of that mind.

We had a good few weeks rotating her food but it was when she was growing a lot (she put on 1kg in 6 weeks). Its not worked since.

Eric is not the only dog who turns his nose up at food other dogs would love, ours does it too.

She won't eat veg either.

I think it's a poodle thing

Fussy buggers

My late dog did this, we never "established" any real feeding, exactly as you describe it, ok one meal but not the next. He was half poodle! When he arrived as a puppy he was on a dry puppy food, managed that for a few weeks then at the transition to the adult version he started to refuse meals. We spent a long time trying various tins and trays. One tip I would give is do actually throw away an uneaten meal after an hour (or less) particularly during the summer, don't leave it down all day "just in case"- you get unspeakable things in it pretty quickly.

I'd be interested to hear from any of the vets/nurses that come on here sometimes as I was told over and over again that it wasn't a problem, if hungry he will eat etc., but that wasn't true. He would even get upset and refuse to eat if we had visitors.

Finally refusing to eat was one of the things that led to his being put to sleep after an operation went wrong, as part of his recovery he was meant to have special food for a while, ended up having to be tube fed, then I fed him with a syringe but not enough to help him recover properly. But the vet kept saying to me he must eat as if it was something I was preventing! Anyway I am not telling you that to scare you he had a rare complication after surgery, but just to illustrate how determined my dog was not to eat.

We are hoping to get a puppy soon and I am worried that history will repeat itself.

Nutriment is wet,it's pre-prepared Raw

www.nutriment.co/dog-range/

BurningBridges I'm sorry about your last dog and hope your new puppy eats like a normal dog!

Before we got this dog I would have never ever believed a dog would starve itself when it had access to food, but she does!

I agree Soubriquet poodles are fussy buggers. I want another one anyway

"Please tell me I'm not the only person with a dog who would rather make themselves sick with hunger than eat something they like but don't fancy right then?"

No, but...why is her bowl still down? First thing you do with a fussy dog is give them ten minutes if they don't eat you take it away tillage next mealtime.

That's what we did with ours Tab,and no treats in between.

Thanks for the link Bea, storage is still an issue but I'll think on it.

Tabulahrasa that was indeed the first thing we tried. Did it for months. All that happened was I spent ages cleaning up vomit, stopping a poodle from eating things she shouldn't, or spending £80 (each vet visit) so the vet could make her vomit up the non food stuff she had eaten. It didn't help her at all so we gave up.

See that to me suggests that she is eating it then, just not the amount you think she should be?

Is she spayed?

I wasn't being critical btw, mine will happily not eat for 3 days if I give him food he deems not edible, just wondering why it was down.