Apparently in my household, the cat food dish and the dog food dish exist as serving platters from which morsels are chosen before being carried to a carpeted area. We’ve had three dogs over the years, all of whom will take dog biscuits to the living room or dining room to eat. I guess they don’t taste as good on tile?? One dog would take mouthsful of kibble to eat the same way. Our current animated throw rug does eat her kibble at the bowl (lying down) but only because it would require her to take 5 or 6 steps to get to the carpet, and she’s a lazy slug.
Same with the goofy cat, sorta. She’s fed on the landing of the basement stairs, because it’s behind a door and the dog can’t fix through the cat door. The landing is carpeted. I had to spread a dish towel and put the cat’s bowl on it, because she, also, removes kibble by the mouthful, drops it on the covered floor, then eats it. The dish towel serves to contain most of it, but she still gets a mess on the lovely 70s-era yellow and orange patterned carpeting. :eek:
I can’t have the only animal companions who have such a perplexing eating habit, can I? Has anyone here witnessed similar behavior from critters? Anyone know why the heck IAMS pellets taste better mixed with synthetic lint?
I’m guessing it’s a throwback to dragging a kill off someplace to eat in private?
I don’t feed pellets, so don’t regularly use bowls. The dogs generally eat outside and rush off to their respective corners of the yard or deck to chow down. (They’re not “outside dogs”, I just feed them outside.) I have noticed that if the dogs don’t find their food particularly tasty, they tend to carry it around a bit first.
The cat likes to remove his food from the bowl, when he has bowl-type food. I have a big plastic mat for him so he can make a mess, but at least it’s mostly contained.
Do your dogs do the same thing if you feed them something like a piece of hot dog, select human leftovers, or something extra-specially tasty, or just with the pellets?
Should have previewed my other post, meant to add - one reason cats take food out of the bowl first is to prevent their whiskers bumping on the bowl while they eat. They don’t like that.
When both of my critters get “people food” (yeah, I toss them tidbits when I’m cooking) they snarf them down on the spot. After all, if they left the immediate area of the stove or counter, they might miss a morsel and the other one might get it! Our goofy cat actually ran between the dog’s front legs to retrieve a small piece of chicken that the dog somehow missed.
No, it’s just the kibble-like substances that are removed to a carpeted surface.
Our dog does that too! I thought it was just a weird thing she did. She takes mouthfuls of kibble and drops them on the carpet, then eats them. Animals are so wierd.
I read somewhere several years ago (please don’t pester me for a cite, I have oe idea where) that cats and dogs don’t like their whiskers to touch the sides of the bowl when they’re eating, so I feed my dog and cats from flat plates. They never take the food anywhere else- they eat it right off the plate. I feed the dog from a small cookie sheet, because it has raised edges and he does like to shove his dry food around a bit before he eats it, and the raised edges keep it from getting all over the floor.
I have no idea whether they really like the flat dishes better, or they are just not inclined to take their food elsewhere.
One of my cats does this. My older cat, Cordelia, is a very dainty eater. She’ll get a teeny mouthful of food and then take a step back and munch on it. This is a problem, because the younger cat, don Francisco, insists on doing everything she does, including eat out of the same bowl, and he is a pig with fur. He’ll stick his whole head in the bowl, burying his nose in the food, and just sorta open and close his mouth, inhaling as much food as he possibly can. This makes it difficult for Cordelia to get in and take another dainty bite.
I have no idea why she does this. She doesn’t drag it very far – just out of the bowl. I would be willing to put it down to a throwback to instincts, however, as she’s very much more the one of the two of them who has retained a sense of ‘wildness’. Don Francisco’s a big softie who lets me cuddle up to him at night like he’s a teddy bear. No “proper” wild cat would do that
My younger dog has his bowl finished a nano second after it hits the ground, so there’s no time to move it anywhere. My older dog likes to take mouthfuls of kibbles into the other room to eat. This leads to the younger dog staring longingly at the older dog’s still full food dish while she’s in the other room. He knows not to touch it though. Poor guy won’t go within 3 feet of her food dish at mealtime. They must have had a throw down over the food at some point and he came out on the losing end. I never saw it though.
I think it’s partially a matter of getting a good grip on the food. They reach in and get a piece of kibble, but it’s not situated quite right. They drop it to get a better grip on it. I think this because I’ve seen the way one of our cats rolls the kibble around a bit in his mouth when he picks it directly out of the bowl, like he’s trying to get a good biting surface.
That’s an interesting thought - it actually seems to make sense. Although it doesn’t explain the preference for a fuzzy dining surface. And, interestingly enough, when they get their evening mini-meals of wet food (more like a treat than a full meal) they don’t take that stuff elsewhere.
Wow! Very interesting thread. One of my dogs and both cats do this. The Bassett Hound is the only one who doesn’t. But then, she just inhales everything that might possibly be food so fast she wouldn’t have time to take it anywhere.
I have a lot of little dogs (okay, pomeranians, nine at the moment) and three cats.
I have bowls for everyone, no sharing is needed. However, all but two of the dogs will go to the bowl, snatch a mouthful of kibble, and then trot off to another spot, spit out the kibble and then eat it off the carpet piece by piece, then run back to get another mouthful. Alpha male and kibble-a-holic female prefer to lie in front of their bowls and nosh, although alpha male does like to tip the bowl over and eat the spilled kibble.
The cats, one big male who hollers if there isn’t right at this moment fresh kibble available. He then jams his face into the bowl with his mouth wide open, stuffs his face, and then chomps, with kibble bits falling from the sides of his mouth. My pretty siamese/tabby cross is very dainty when she eats, straight from the bowl, no mess, no fuss. Then there is gimpy kitty. She has neurological issuse from being attacked as a kitten, and hurt quite badly, by the psycho min pin my daughter has. She lives in my (different) daughter’s room, as she needs a litter box and doesn’t walk very well, and I worry about her being eagle bait, so she’s an inside kitty. She flops down next to the bowl, takes out a mouthful, drops it on the floor and proceeds to eat it.
I used to have a cockatiel, and if he didn’t like a particular food (pellets and I also cooked for him) he would throw the offending bits out of the cage, and he could get some major range on the thrown bits, as in 10 feet or more! He was a crazy bird, and I miss him!
I have ferrets who will sometimes pull food out of their (fairly large and deep) food bowl and eat it on the floor next to the bowl. Then again, sometimes one of them will practically wrap her arms around the bowl and hog it, her head stuffed down in the bowl and gulping the food down.
This is my experience as well, and the experience of anyone who I gave this tip. I think the confusion stems from petshops who’re still selling foodbowls with " kitty" printed on them. Those keep selling because people think that’s what they need.
In addition, foodbowls with straight edges have the cat pushing it around the kitchen floor to get the last bits out of the corner.
I use a wide bowl for dry kibble, and plain dinner plates for wet kibble. Immediately after the cats have finished, the plate is washed. That’s another disadvantage of those pet-food bowls: they are harder to clean, so they don’t get cleaned as often, resulting in bad smell.
Cats are used to drinking from narrow cracks or pools with low water-table. So the rule “whiskers must not touch edges” doesn’t apply there. I give my cats water from a heavy glass pitcher set on the kitchen floor, set at a distance from the bowls of catfood. Cats do seem to have a preference not to drink water from the same place they eat. makes sense; remains of a kill left lying for a few days might spoil water nearby for a while.
I keep Pepper’s water dish well away from her food. Not for evolutionary reasons, but because if I don’t, she’ll manage to get lots of crumbs in the water making a nasty-looking soup out of it.
Baron will usually take his kibbles to another place to eat - bones he eats where they fall. When it comes to people food, he always eats off the plate, FWIW.
I know for a FACT that my dog is conspiring SOMETHING - he has been acting VERY suspicious lately - and I have a strong suspicion he is making long distance phone calls while we’re at work during the day.
Ginger the Pug, varies her behavior. Sometimes she’ll drop the kibbles on the floor beside the bowl before she munches. Sometimes she eats right from the bowl. Occassionally she gets confused and drops some bites and eats other from the same bowl in the same meal.
Treats, on the other hand, are hoovered up as soon as they get near her mouth without regard to dishes.
She won’t eat or drink from a shiney stainless steel bowl where she can see her reflection.
