Ditching the Bowl: 5 Reasons I’m Switching Back to Hand Feeding

In this blog post, I'm going to explore 5 reasons why I'm ditching the dog bowl and going back to hand feeding at least one meal a day (preferably breakfast).

On the other hand (no pun intended) meal times are a great training opportunity especially for dogs that have behaviour issues and many owners miss out on this opportunity.

You can still provide great training opportunities from a bowl - waiting and rewarding calmness and self control, or even asking for some basic obedience before rewarding with food.

Hand feeding takes all of this to another level completely, it lays the groundwork for a foundation built on respect, cooperation and effective communication.

The thing I love about hand feeding is the opportunity it creates to engage with your dog and develop that relationship and engagement whilst also bringing value onto you.

The best time to start hand feeding for dogs is when they're puppies, getting them to work for their food and reward or shape behaviours you want to see more of.

The next best time is realistically as soon as possible especially if you do have a dog with behavioural issues.

When it comes to hand feeding I can incorporate his feeding into our regular routine. I could feed him his whole breakfast on our daily morning wander or split it between the walk and an afternoon training session followed by his dinner etc.

You can literally make an excuse to train at any point to not only build that drive in your dog but also shows you to be super valuable when out in distracting and challenging environments.

As mentioned the reason we stopped hand feeding was because my schedule got so crazy and it was the lesser of two evils to feed from a bowl. I thought it would be more beneficial and quicker but instead it seemed to cause more anxiety and frustration at meal times and also showed a decline in training and behaviour.

With bowl feeding, as much as I tried to provide a structure and instil calmness at these feeding times, it started to become a frustrating experience.

I feel the worst thing was the consistency of it all, because my schedule was a bit more chaotic there were times I couldn't wait for Jasper to calm down and had to opt at giving him food in the wrong state of mind.

So to save frustration on both our ends, rebuild that calmness around food and also rebuild consistency and engagement we will be getting back to our old ways of hand feeding.

Do you have a dog that will wolf down a bowl of food in no time? You've even used slow feeders but it seems to cause an increase in arousal during feeding times.

This is why I love hand feeding, whether you are feeding for obedience or even if you're doing something such as scatter feeding, you are increasing the amount of pleasure that your dog is getting from their meals.

I find my dog to be more satisfied after a hand feeding session than if I were to give him a bowl, by being able to stretch out a session anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour will help a lot with mental stimulation on top of his current routine.

There are plenty of options for treats and healthy training treats out there including things like carrots, cheese and hot dogs. The issue is calorie control - the more treats you give, the less food you should give to balance out your dog's intake of food.

Now I'm not someone who's going to remember how many treats my dog had on our morning walk and then try to calculate how much less food he should get.

It's simpler and less frustrating to use a portion of his daily meal or even his whole daily meal throughout the day when needed.

There are so many ways you can use hand feeding and they can all benefit your dog in a number of ways.

I'll be looking to start body awareness and conditioning drills for when it comes down to hand feeding Jasper along with more mentally stimulating activities such as scatter feeding.

I love the variety you have when you opt for hand feeding your dog.

For us I'll be splitting up the majority of Jasper's food and hand feeding about ¾ throughout the day leaving the rest for a bowl feed so we can still focus on self control around his food.

For hand feeding there's 3 things that I'll be focusing on…

To avoid repeatedly rewarding with a mixture of high value rewards and having to reduce food intake I'll be using Jasper's food.

Jasper is also raw fed which in itself is quite high value anyway.

A quick trick for those of you hand feeding raw food, put it in ice cube trays and then freeze and reward. Make sure you use silicone treat pouches and gloves too.

My favourite treats pouch for raw food is Violà.

I also love using scatter feeding in different environments to help increase confidence and help create that neutrality in these environments (socialisation).

Along with helping in training and daily life, body awareness drills and conditioning will help with mobility and would also be a great new adventure for me and Jasper to go through.

I also feel Jasper is a bit of a goof and struggles to control his body and having some body awareness would be beneficial to him.

I'm not rushing to get off hand feeding anytime soon but as I see improvements I'll be reducing the portion I'm using for hand feeding and add that to his evening meal from a bowl.

My long term goal is to be able to use play or a toy as a reward but Jasper is an easily aroused dog so for now that isn't an option.