My cat is very distressed by kibble existing outside of the food bowl. If some bounce out while I’m feeding her, she’ll stare at them, then look at me like “Are you gonna take care of that?” She will not eat from the dish until all the errant kibbles are cleaned up. If I don’t do it, she will resign herself to eating them so she can eat properly out of her food dish.
But I have a very strange cat.
My old miniature rat terrier, Bonnie, used to do this. She loved Kibbles & Bits (I know, it’s not that great), and would eat nothing else. With the big round pieces, she’d run and toss them in the air. She played with them a good while before eating them on the carpet. My current dog eats at the bowl. One thing I’ve noticed though is that he’ll have a whole bowl of food sitting there for hours and then decide to eat the whole thing at once. Then he whines for more and when I fill it, he doesn’t touch it for hours. When I give him treats, he takes it, goes and sets it down, and comes back for more. Sometimes, if my husband and I both give him treats, he ends up with quite a stash. I’ve never actually actually seen him eat a treat, but they I don’t find them around, so he must.
One of our cats has some bizarre eating habits. Wait, make that two. One of our cats likes to paw out his food one piece at a time and eat it on the floor in front of the dish. This is also the cat that doesn’t chew when he’s “starving” and then pukes up whole pieces of food because he eats it too fast. Another of our cats likes to eat his food over the water bowl. This often results in food being deposited in the water bowl, making it disgusting and stinky.
Well, the Adventure Beagles hornk everything down so quickly there’s just no opportunity for dragging stuff around. When they’re done with their kibble they start chewing on the damn food bowls.
I have noticed that they occasionally “store” food somewhere convenient in their esophaguses and then cough it up and re-swallow it, but this behavior seems to be reserved for the times when we have company over.