I am petsitting for a friend currently; he has one cat and one dog. It always fascinates me that with the cat, I can just dump a ton of food in her bowl and trust that she will eat just as much as she needs and ration the food. Of course with the dog, he eats every thing that I place in front of him, so I have to regulate his eating for him. Also he consistently eats most human food, whereas the cat rarely does.
I think this behavior is fairly typical for both cats and dogs. Does anyone know, or have any good theories, as to why there is a difference? Are dogs historically more used to conditions of scarcity, so they have an instinct to eat as much as possible always? Is it because dogs are pack hunters (not sure if this is true) so they need to gobble up their share before another dog gets to it, whereas cats tend to be solitary hunters (not sure if this is true) so they feel like they can eat their food/kill leisurely?
Also, I am solely talking about domestic animals in this thread.
I have two female cats - one eats until all the food is gone, and one wants to graze all day. As you can imagine, we have struggled with keeping them both at a healthy weight with two very different eating styles. Funnily enough, the piggy isn’t very demanding of food - when I only had her, she was quite slim. The grazer demands food all the time (possibly because she leaves food in her dish to come back to later, and the piggy eats it).
Your guesses may be as good as any. There are dogs that refuse to over eat. Some people just leave dry kibble out all the time. There is a thread now bashing such sites as Yahoo Answers. There must be a dozen questions a day there on dogs that won’t eat. In a few cases the OP provides enough details to suggest the dog is sick and needs to see a vet.
For most others, I paste in ''Many dogs will wolf down more than is good for them and look for more. Others refuse to eat more than than they need. Evaluate the dog as illustrated in this link, How To Tell if Your Dog is at a Healthy Weight – Long Live Your Dog You may want the vet to confirm your judgment. Adjust the dogs food and exercise as needed to reach its ideal body condition. Some German Shepherds and other breeds may refuse to eat enough to completely hid their ribs. As long as you are feeding a concentrated, meat based chow, the best thing is to accept it.
The worst thing you can do is to bribe a dog with rich foods into eating more than it needs. Instead, Put down the dish with what the dog should eat, and give it 15 minutes to eat. Then take it up. Do not give it anything to eat until its next scheduled meal. In a few days, it should be eating what it needs. Continue to check its ribs and adjust the food as needed. This is not easy. I had a Shepherd go 3 days on a few nibbles. I was a wreck, but she was fine. It is almost unknown for a healthy dog not to eat what it needs. Unfortunately, in too many cases, it is less than the package says, and less than the owner thinks the dog should have. Many dogs are quite good at holding out for tastier chow. Like kids, sometimes it calls for tough love.‘’
There are always clueless people suggesting all manner of rich food, expensive foods, homemade, and raw.
Shepherds, Boxers, Great Danes, and worst of all Salukis all often won’t eat enough to hide their ribs. I even had a Lab that didn’t.
I think there are as many differences between breeds as between species. I used to have two dogs. (Both died of extreme old age.) I got the English setter mix first, and I could leave food out for him all day; he’d only eat when he was hungry and never overate. Then I got a black lab. She would eat until she nearly exploded. The vet said, “Labs are voracious eaters,” and advised two small meals a day.
My sister has two cats, which she has to feed separately: one (a calico) will eat only what she wants from her dish; the other (a tabby) will eat all his own food and all of hers as well, if it’s there. Guess which one has a weight problem?:rolleyes:
Dogs/wolves aren’t just pack hunters; they are big game hunters. Cats regularly catch animals much smaller than themselves, while dogs & wolves go after animals much larger than themselves. The latter encourages eating all you can before it goes bad or gets grabbed by scavengers. Humans in fact are the same way; human males have been big game hunters since before we were human; human males unsurprisingly therefore like to eat larger meals at one sitting compared to women. No refrigerators on the savanna for leftovers, and our male prehuman ancestors apparently didn’t drag much back to camp with them to share ( a significant difference between them and genuinely human hunter-gatherers).
This thread reminds me of the time my dog Tucker (RIP), a golden mix, refused a treat and scared me to death for a second, because he NEVER EVER EVER refused a treat.
Then i looked closer at him…and realized that he looked like he’d swallowed a couple of watermelons whole.
Knowing his interests, I checked the backyard, and the composter I had just filled with the garbage from clearing out the pantry: old bread, crackers, snacks, everything imaginable that wasn’t meat.
Guess who dug under the bin door?
Poor baby looked miserable. But he was fine by the next day, and he didn’t retain the memory of what stuffing himself felt like, remained a bit of a pig his entire much-too-short wonderful life.
Wonder if that is also sort of why women tend to veggies and salads more than heavy duty meat based meals. Think about it - how many times have we seen Tony Bourdain go into oralgasm over a 24 oz porterhouse, or half a cochon du lait and how many times over the perfect salad… where Rachel Ray orgazms over a huge chefs salad …
[actually, i am a bit serious here, most men I know are dedicated carnivore end of the spectrum, and most women I know actually like to eat salads and vegetables in addition to the various meats. I am an outlier in that I seem to adore a perfect steak as much as the perfect artichoke or other veggie dish]
I think, and I’m not alone, that most American women, at least, don’t have a clue about what they would really like to eat because it’s all so tied up with so many other issues that they lost touch with the simple awareness of and pleasure of food when they were just kids.
Thanks for the responses guys! I actually didn’t know about how much variation there was within a species. I sort of assumed that all dogs ate everything, and all cats were grazers. Good to know that’s not the case!
Well you weren’t too far off. We have had 23 different dogs in our house plus numerous visitors. I can only remember 3 that would walk away from uneaten food. The first one was believe it or not, a male Lab. Strange dog. He would steal paper off the table and leave food. If he got loose, he would run up to you when he saw you coming with the leash. The second was a Shepherd. typical of them. The third was a daughter of hers we sat one weekend shortly after she had been bred. She wouldn’t touch the puppy chow she was supposed to be eating even chicken broth on it. I finally got her to eat a little of her regular adult food. Her people were pleased she ate anything.
I know litte of cats. I will say that with some dogs not only do you need to put the cats’ food where the dog can’t get it, the litter box too.
Where did Garfield as a glutton come from? ‘‘Fat cats’’?
When I put together all the cat anecdotes I’m familiar with, my WAG is that a cat who eats everything available is one who has known starvation.
We free feed our two cats: they have a food silo we keep full of high quality kibble, and they nibble at their pleasure. Both are an optimum weight for their sex and age.
Many of the cat owners I tell about this are astounded and say their cat would just eat the whole thing. Their cats would turn out to be rescues or strays (kudos on that), while both our cats came to us from private homes where they always had enough to eat.
It depends on what kind of food I give my dog whether he’ll graze or wolf it all down. Most dry kibble I can feed him once a day and he’ll eat a little, walk away, then return later and eat some more. But he will finish all of it within a day. He’s about a 75 pound Lab and I feed him 4 or 5 cups of food. However, now, he’s eating lamb and rice kibble and will absolutely inhale it. I have to feed him half in the morning and half in the evening. Otherwise he will eat all of it at once, then go all day with no more food until the next day. He eats no people food, by the way. Just dog food and an abundance of dog treats.
Great tip that will help keep him healthy (avoiding gastric torsion, a potentially fatal twisting of the gut that big dogs who eat fast are at high risk for, and it kills very fast, relatively speaking) AND help keep him stimulated and amused: feed him via treat dispensers. My dog get about 80% of his meals via some kind of challenge that slows him way down and keeps him busy.
My guy is so good at it and used to it that I have taken to making Puppy Popsicles by making his food wet (adding canned and water, cottage cheese, whatever) and stuffing it inside toys and bones and freezing it. A full day’s rations can fill a lot of different things and keep him occupied for hours spread over the day.
There’s also a great variation in dogs that were spayed/neutered versus dogs that were not. My last dog only got spayed when she was 11 years old (she lived to 17.5) – and before she got spayed wouldn’t even touch anything that didn’t have meat in it. Especially not those stale croutons people feed their pets for some reason.
