Suggestions on How To Stop This Dog Behavior?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m out of ideas. I tried snapping “NO!” at her every time I see this behavior. I tried squirting her with a water gun (which she loved). I tried lobbing a tennis ball at her to distract her. God help me, I even tried grabbing her by the scruff and giving her a shake like a “mommy dog.” Nothing works.

Polaris loves to bury things. In the house, she will use throws, pillows, bits of paper-- whatever she can find-- to bury her treats. It’s cute, especially the shocked and outraged expression on her face when one of her sliblings easily locates the hidden item.

But what drives me nuts is that she wants to “bury” her food. All of the dogs eat from a communal large food dispenser and matching water dispenser (they look like water coolers). Polaris will go over and use her nose to scrape water over the food. I have a rubber mat under the bowls, but her splashing soaks the wall, the baseboards, and slops it over the edge of the mat onto my hardwood floors.

She seems driven to do it by some powerful instinct. Normally a very obedient dog, she will completely ignore me while doing this unless I drag her away. And then she’ll race right back to it. It’s almost like she can’t help herself. If there’s no water near the food bowl, she will pretend to push invisible dirt over it, or scrape her nose raw on the carpet trying to use it to cover the food.

I’ve speculated that it’s not only her burying instinct, but that she likes her food wet. (And, no, there’s nothing wrong with her teeth.) She’ll go over after the food’s had a little time to soak, lap off the excess water, and then eat it.

Of course, the obvious solution would be to move the water bowl, but that wouldn’t stop her from rubbing her nose raw, and the eldest dog is very touchy about her food and water dispensers. (Moving it would cause her to refuse to use it. I kid you not.)

If she were a human, I’d call it obsessive-compulsive disorder, because in all my years of owning dogs, I’ve never seen one so intent on following a behavior that she ignores all discipline.

What to do?

2

I’m not sure, as I’ve never had this kind of problem.
You probably need seperate dishes for her, but getting the dogs in the household to comply is difficult. Make sure each dish is easily distinguishable from another by a dog.
Or, when she starts this behavior, restrain her with a leash tied down, but in sight of the bowls. When she “gives up,” let her off. Repeat until she gets the idea.

3

I own a peeka-pug (puganese…heh) that is obsessed with burying also. I believe it comes from the fact that when she was young, I had a hound (she is my girlfriends dog) and he was large…He loved her, you could tell, but when he tried to hug, he often knocked her over…play with toys often meant he would try and she couldn’t reach…just a rough situation for her…he was older, in doggy-puberty, and growing insanely…also eating a ton…

After I gave him to a friend of mine that lives out on a farm, she kept hiding food from everyone. I found the best way to deal with her problem was to watch her with the food and if she started to go bury it, make her sit by me and not move until she finished it. She has learned very well, but the water…eh, different story altogether that I cannot even begin to help you with…

4

Dogd can get a lot of the same disorders as people. This just might be a little doggy OCD. Maybe if she were fed separately from the others that would help? She seems to be picky about she wants her food, and perhaps is “burying” it so the others won’t take it all. So, have you tried giving this one her own dish already?

5

I tried this. The dogs wouldn’t go along with it. They simply treated all three bowls as communal. We free-feed, meaning that there’s always food in the bowls. The dogs just wandered over to the nearest container and got a mouthful whenever they got the munchies.

I’ve tried something similar. I sat watching the bowls. Whenever she would start to scrape the water over the food, I would make her stop. She gives me this guilty I-can’t-help-it look, and goes right back to it.

6

I would stop the free-feeding. Dogs digest better and eliminate more predictably when they’re fed twice a day. It wouldn’t take long to break this habit.

I would feed each dog separately.

When our dog lost interest in her food for a little while, we got a “treat ball” - as it rolls, it dispenses little bits of her food. She LOVES it and it keeps her attention until she finishes her whole meal.

7

Dog trainer here.

  1. stop free-feeding
  2. offer the food at specific times of day - breakfast and dinner works well - for 15 minutes. If the dog walks away from it, take it away, and try again at the next meal. Trust me, I have yet to see a dog starve itself to death.
  3. offer food, THEN water. Always have fresh water available (like in a dispenser).

Quickly, poochie will learn that if it walks away from its dish, it’s not getting fed. Better to just eat and move on to the next thing, then. When I have a refusal to eat from a dog with eating issues, I usually only offer HALF a normal meal at the next try. This conditions the dog to eat on a regular schedule. Also note that for all sorts of medical reasons (later on, what happens if one dog is on a special diet? What happens if they’re on a drug that REQUIRES a full tummy? What if one gets fat and you want to regulate what he or she eats?), regular meals are better than free-feeding. For entertainment, you can also try feeding her part of a meal in a Buster Cube.

8

I also meant to add:

Free feeding a pack (more than 2 dogs = pack) can TOTALLY encourage hoarding behaviors. Digging to bury food is a display of such behavior.

9

Slight hikack here, but my Springer/Border mix does this odd thing whenever we give him what I call a “long-term” treat (Busy Bone, Meaty Bone, etc.).

He’ll eat about half of it, and then ask to be let outside. If you’re paying attention whenyou go to the door, you’ll notice a strange bulge in his mouth. When you get his attention, and he looks up, he obviously has the other half in his mouth.

When he was a puppy (he’s 1.3 y.o. now, so mybe he’s still a puppy), he would get a treat, and then ask to go outside. As we were encouraging his asking to go outside, we woudl always let him out when he asked. He would take a treat outside and bury it. (Trust me…there’s nothing like a months-old buried pig ear applied to the bare foot to make you jump!)

If you get his attention and ask why he wants to go outside, he starts to look very furtive, and sometimes walks away from the door…and walks right back again, believing he’s “reset” the whole process. He then asks to go out with bulging mouth again. When I get him to spit it out, he looks at the treat in my hand and whines at the door. He so obviously wants to go bury that thing…

Weird, eh?

10

It would be interesting to know how he behaved in the pack when he was little and surrounded by litter mates. If he’s a more submissive kind of dog, it may be that he was “picked on”, for the grub, and later on felt like he had to save every little bit he didn’t want right away.

One of my dogs was a middle-of-the-pack puppies in a litter where the dominant pups were REALLY dominant. When he was little, he was a gulper. He’d inhale his food so fast he’d throw it back up. I used to spread his food on a cookie sheet so he would actually come up for air between bites.

:wink:

11

My parents had a dog that buried his food. He wasn’t free fed, and he was an only dog. He didn’t do it until he was about 11-12 years old. He would eat about 1/2 of his dinner, then nose the newpaper that his dish sat on over the top of his food bowl. Didn’t do it every night, mabe half the time.
Sometime later he would come “dig” his food up and finish it. Cracked us up.

12

I would really hate to stop free-feeding them. The oldest, Bean, is 10 years old and is ultra-resistant to change. (She once refused to drink for three days because I gave her a new bowl.) Accepting the other two dogs into her exclusive territory was sdtressful enough for her-- I didn’t want to make more changes than I had to. If I free-feed her, I have to free-feed the others. Nor is my schedule conducive to set feeding times.

None of my dogs over-eat. The vet always praises me because they’re so fit.

None of them are possesive of food-- the two younger ones will eat at the same time from the same bowl, so I don’t think her behavior is an attempt to keep the other dogs away from her bowl. They will also switch treats. Polaris just seems bound by a powerful instinct to bury.

13

No great advice, Lissa, but you have my sympathy. My CAT buries. Very compulsively: buryburybury, clanking the food bowl the whole time until it drives me around the bend and I hide it temporarily in the microwave or oven. She occasionally sloshes water, too. She’s really thin, so I like for her to have food available, but it’s SO annoying. She’ll also drag bits of paper, even receipts and teabag tags out of the trash to “cover” the food with - very resourceful, I have to say.
**
Elenfair**'s advice sounds really good - I wish it would work with a cat!