So I am by no means an expert dog owner and as this is my first dog, I’d appreciate any thoughts as searches on pet sites hit thousands of threads and comments but nothing I have found that is what I am observing.
I have a 10 year old Havanese. He’s in generally great shape with no major concerns or illnesses. He does like to chew on long grass and vomit on the floor afterward but that is only when I have mowed in too long. He has been eating the good food (Origen) for 8 years- other than 1 bag from not our regular store that we threw out last year as he just wouldn’t eat it. He has never been particular food focused - except for treats- and will often leave his food for hours before eating. And if we are on vacation or working longer hours, he will not eat for a day or two until he calms and warms to the new situation.
But recently, when he decides to eat he insists on dumping out his bowl and eating on the ground. He’ll eat treats just fine out of the bowl and will sometimes eat regular food out of his bowl. We’ve tried mixing up the bowl, and he will eat normally out of a bowl for a few days and then start the dumping the bowl with his paw behavior.
Now similarly, he has over the past three months been trying to dump his water bowl… but with his snout. He doesn’t seem to want to dump it but rather spill it and then lick up the water on the sides and on the ground. He has always preferred the toilet bowl as long as it has been recently scrubbed and has a clean bowl- he’ll jump up to look and sniff first before he goes for it- so we can usually stop it. Now with regard to the bowl, we finally went with a much lower profile and lower angled soup bowl which stopped the tipping. We don’t know if this is just because he can’t get an angle to lift the bowl or he is generally happier. Also, other data point is that he will go for a drink immediately after bowl has been dumped and refilled in the morning. But cooling the water with ice cubes is not of interest so it isn’t a water temp thing.
But when he does drink, he is angled and only drinks up against the side of the bowl. I don’t know if that is new, but when he eats out of the bowl he is positioned normally and eating and chewing regularly.
We were thinking that maybe his eyes are clouding a bit and maybe he doesn’t like putting he snout into bowls? but I haven’t been able to find out why he isn’t eating and drinking “normally” as his food and bowls (6 different ones in rotation and no preference for any specific one before or now) have been around forever and he’s not sick in any way. He still jumps from the ground to the back of the couch in a single leap (4 feet up and 4 feet horizontally) confidently as well as running 10 living room laps at a full sprint so he may getting older but he is still feeling like a puppy most of the time.
So any thoughts or suggestions or experiments would be appreciated!?!
And as my kids are going to mock me for actually starting a thread on my dog, I figured I’d list his tricks to show how proud I am of my dog training.
Sit, lie, all the way down, show me your belly, wait, leave it, off, ball, hop, dance, roll over, shut the door, say hi (nose touch to palm), skin (gives ‘high’ five), walk, go for a ride, outside, inside, scootch back, steady, treat and food and right now are all recall, let’s go, and SING (the best one last, where he will make a high pitch growl).
Now to be fair fully half of the commands only work with food in my hand. I highly recommend a Havanese for a first pet.
How are his teeth? That and arthritis are my first questions when it comes to many weird new behaviors in a 10-year-old dog or cat, especially a small dog. It may somehow be easier on his teeth or something about the way he has to move to eat from the bowl might otherwise be (even mildly) painful to him. He sounds like a smart dog.
Maybe see what happens if you feed him on a plate instead and/or try a slightly elevated feeder. If he’s arthritic, the elevated feeder helps because he doesn’t have to lean down as far to eat and drink and it makes it harder to tip the bowls over if he’s just having a bit of fun making messes.
A few thoughts:
-What kind of material are the bowls made of? Sometimes the melamine bowls will develop worn spots that could irritate his nose?
-Could the smell be putting him off for some reason? Have you tried giving him an entirely new bowl to see what happens?
-It could be a physical problem, such as with his eyes, teeth, or his nose. Have you had him checked by the vet?
It’s a dog thing, usually nothing to worry about. There’s some possibility his mouth is injured somehow making it more difficult for him to eat and drink from the bowl. But dogs just do weird things sometimes.
We had a Lab pup that went through a phase of tipping over her water bowl, then reverted to normal behavior.* Our current dog doesn’t tip bowls, but on the other hand is the sloppiest drinker of any canine we’ve ever had, dripping copious amounts on the floor of his crate or wherever he has access to a water bowl (this is apparently a field spaniel trait).
Dogs have idiosyncrasies. As long as the OP’s dog is eating and drinking adequate amounts I wouldn’t worry about it.
*most embarrassingly, one time I took her to a garden center where they fussed over her and offered her a sizable bowl of water. She clambered into it and started splashing. :smack:
It’s teeth. I had an old dog who would dump her food even on a paper plate and lay down and gingerly lick one piece at a time into her mouth. She’d hold her head all the way back to chew the morsels. Her canines were bad. We had them pulled and she never had any more trouble.
My dog did that as a puppy and now and again in his mid-teens. I never had a good explanation but I do know his “moms owners” just fed the puppies on the floor so I wrote it of and learned behavior and as he aged a return to memory.
Does he have tags dangling from his collar that hit the bowl? Maybe the sound of that bothers him. Even if it happened all along, he may have just decided it bothered him one day. Maybe the tags snagged on the bowl and spooked him?
I suspect this too. It’s hard to tell if they’re in pain from bad teeth - they’re great at trying to soldier on. Does he have bad breath? I know the common misconception is that dogs just have bad breath, but they don’t - it’s usually a sign of tooth infection or decay.
One of the boxers we used to have would have bouts of tummy issues that would sometimes turn into pancreatitis. I could always tell when he wasn’t feeling good because he would fling his bowl all over the place spilling his food. He’d push the bowl with his nose until it spilled and then he’d push the pieces of food around on the floor. He wouldn’t eat it. I finally put his bowl inside a cardboard box that had about 6" sides. It kept the food corralled.
My dog comes to work with me every day, so he’s got two food bowls. The one at home he eats out of just fin, but the one at work, he insists I tip out for him. He’ll have a couple of bites and then steps back and does a little “hmmph.” The same noise for “my water bowl has too little water in it.” I’ll tip the food onto the floor and he eats it up.
Thank you all for the ideas. We had thought about the tags- may try experimenting with them off. He also has terrible breath, but it looks like his teeth are fine. And once on the ground, he eats at a decent pace- not as aggressively as the TV commercial dogs but it’s all gone within a few minutes.
And the bowls are the boring plain metal bowls, Ikea white porcelain cereal bowls, or standard crate & barrel soup bowls. Varying in depths and widths. I may try a cottage cheese container as it would be soft but also very easy to tip and see what he does.
They don’t want poop on their feet. Mr.Wrekker has a kennel full of Beagles they are all weird about poop. They have a poop area away from hanging out spots and their bedroom. If the potty area gets too full they start complaining. Mr.Wrekker has to clean it out. A big nasty job. He adds sand and cedar shavings. Beagles be weirder than other hound breeds. I call them all drama queens.
My little house Beagle can’t get her fat butt in the air or she would do that. Now she poops and speeds away. Doing that foot wiping/running in place move.