Making Meal Times Fun!

If dogs were free-ranging, they would spend their days scavenging, foraging and gathering food.  Indeed survival requires a great deal of physical exercise and problem solving ability.  This of course, is in direct contrast to the life of a pet dog. 

As humans, we enjoy our food and look forward to meal times.  Yet for dogs, even though our lovely food at Dogs Delight is formulated to meet all their needs, if we simply serve it in a bowl only for it to be eaten in 30 seconds – we can begin to see that this isn’t what dogs were designed to do and it certainly isn’t much fun!

Dogs don’t have much control of their day-to-day lives in a busy household so how can we make meal times appeal more to their natural foraging behaviour?

Enrichment feeding for dogs means adding something more meaningful and rewarding by appealing to their love of scavenging and foraging.  There are lots of benefits:

• Slows down feeding
• Creates a sense of achievement when food is found
• Encourages natural foraging behaviour
• Useful for training – for example crate training – keeping the dog occupied with something positive for a short period of time.
• Will burn more calories
• Prevents boredom, helps with separation anxiety  and possible destructive behaviours
• Stimulates and assists in brain growth 
• Builds confidence the bond with their human