Hmmm, I’m liking the theory that this is submissive behavior. An alpha dog eats directly from the kill. A beta dog snatches a bit from the kill, and retreats to eat the bit without getting reprimanded by the alpha.
My dog does this too! My vet says it is because he has a flat muzzle and can’t breathe and eat with his face in his food? At least he is on just dry kibble.
I can see that, but Jordie doesn’t have a flat muzzle. I am sure the correct answer is somewhere between different dogs do it for different reasons, and my dog is just plain crazy-nuts.
Good lord my dog does the exact same thing. She (Miniature Pinscher) will grab a mouthful of food, and run to either the rug or the couch and drop it all out, then eat piece by piece. It’s strange. I don’t have a clue why, but sometimes it’s almost as if she’s showing off that she’s eating food and I’m not.
For a data point, her food bowl is on hardwood floor and kinda-sorta facing a wall, so the visibility/not liking hard floor causes might be valid.
Is he a large dog? It might be uncomfortable for him to reach his head down to the bowl if he’s very tall.
In response to this, he uses a very shallow plastic bowl. He is pretty small so it is actually a cat food dish.
The woman we’re staying with is a former veterinary assistant who does some informal animal rehab, so we have an assortment of animals with odd habits around. (One dog, for example, requires that her bowl be placed on the floor and slid to her; just setting it in front of her does not equate to ‘it’s my dinner’ in her mind.) The two cats and dog with this habit here seem to be taking their food to a ‘safe’ place to eat – not that the selected location is at all obviously more safe, but it’s apparently more defensible. We also have a dog who believes that her food must be tipped out of the bowl onto the floor next to it; then it may be eaten.
He is not what I would call real tall. Toby the wonder dog is about 65 lbs and average size for a lab/pit mix.
Our last dog, Indiana Bones, was at least 8" taller at the shoulder and never did this.
Both my Boston Terrorists have flat muzzles. Only the beta dog bolts to eat.
We feed our dog on a plate - reason being is so that her whiskers don’t strike the edges of the bowls. When we switched to the plate, she stopped carrying her food out of the kitchen.
She’s half jack, half min-pin.
She takes her treats anywhere, and loves to munch carrots one little nibble at a time.
My dog used to that too, with treats. A poster mentioned that perhaps that was particularly a Beta-dog habit. Mine is a Golden, and you can’t get more Beta than that.
He did give up the behavior after age 2, though.
Our two dogs are dominant in different areas of interest. Sadie is toy-dominant and will take a toy from Simone and even snarf at Simone if she tries to challenge for the toy. But Simone is food-dominant and will displace Sadie from Sadie’s own bowl of kibble (she won’t try to force Sadie away from wet food, however…I don’t know why). Sadie often takes several kibbles and retreats to eat them on the carpet when Simone comes to hog her bowl.
So I agree that it can be a submissive behavior – whether it is or not in this particular case.
My parents have two dogs. They have separate bowls. The Alpha dog will sometimes tip his bowl over and eat off the floor, but neither carries it to a new location unless it is a bone, which they’ll both take outside.
It seems to be two separate behaviors with different reasons:
- Eating just outside the bowl vs
- Taking the food somewhere else entirely
For #1 I’m guessing it’s a minor annoyance factor like the aforementioned short muzzle or whiskers hitting the bowl. #2 seems more like a submissive / protect your food type of thing.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned in this thread: I’ve seen the same two behaviors with my cats as well. Eating just outside the bowl/plate is decidedly the more common of the two behaviors at my house, but I once had a cat that would consistently run off with any human food.
Side question: I saw the photo, and he/she looks great. What kind of dog is he?
The OP’s dog appears to be a toy Pomeranian. They are crazy cute.
One of our dogs used to do this, but it was to detect and avoid medications being hidden in his food. 
I just spoke to Buddy’s breeder, and read off all the reasons so far on this thread. He agreed they all sounded reasonable.
His contribution (said not as a joke), was that maybe the dog simply liked to eat with its master.
My dog does it too. She was a stray who lived on the streets for about 4 months before the Humane Society could catch her. My vet says she does it because she is essentially hiding her food from other dogs/animals who might want to take the food from her, and that taking small bites elsewhere to eat hides the source of food from the other animals. So even if they managed to get that food from her, she’d still have the main stash elsewhere.
My parents had a dog – Sophie, a small golden/samoyed-looking mutt and the most submissive omega dog I’ve ever met – who would drop her kibble outside the dish and bark at it, and play-bow to it, before eating any. She grew out of the barking part after a few years, but continued to start every meal with the dropping-outside-the-dish part all her life.