Beyond the Bowl: Feed Your Furry Friend’s Belly and Soul

How best to feed our dogs is one of the most ethically fraught choices we make as loving caregivers to our furry companions. A core duty of a responsible dog guardian is to provide consistent, predictable access to nutritionally appropriate food and fresh water. That sounds simple enough. But it isn’t so simple, is it? And it is only the beginning. Over the past several years, considerations about feeding dogs have expanded to include behavioral and social needs related to food.

Many of us spend countless hours trying to figure out the healthiest food choices, sifting through nutritional advice and asking trusted sources such as our veterinarian what is best for our dogs.

In one of my recent posts, I explored the behavioral needs of dogs in relation to poop and pee—which mean far more for dogs than simply a chance to empty bladder and bowels. A similar point can be made about feeding: There is far more to feeding than simply plopping down a bowl of kibble.

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Physical needs

Discussion about how best to feed dogs tends to focus on the content of the food, the “what.”

What is the right food? This is impossible to answer in the abstract, except to say that we should aim to give our dog food that optimizes their well-being. So, we look for food that provides what a dog’s body needs (nutritionally meaningful ingredients, not cheap fillers such as sawdust), gives them energy to be physically active, doesn’t upset their stomach, doesn’t cause allergic reactions such as itchy skin, doesn’t put them in a low mood, and accounts for individualized medical needs. And, of course, we aim for food that our dog likes, or maybe even loves (see below for a cautionary tale).

Beyond the question of what to feed lie a range of interesting questions about when and how we feed. And this is where things start to get really interesting.

Rewarding properties of food

Many dog guardians get hung up on the palatability of food. And this is certainly important—we want our dogs to enjoy their meals. But other rewarding properties of food are equally important, including its smell, appearance, and texture (especially ‘mouthfeel’). Even the shape of a kibble can affect how appealing it is to a particular dog and also, it seems, can influence how well a dog chews his food, with one study showing that changing kibble shape from round to cross-sectional resulted in more chewing behaviour, slower ingestion speed, and a significant decrease in food-seeking behaviour. This is particularly beneficial when seeking to manage excessive body weight.

There are really easy ways to test palatability: Watch your dog eating and look for signs of pleasure. How excited does your dog get when the food is being prepared? Would he care if you pulled the dish away? You could taste test comparison of several different types of food—which does your dog eat first and with greatest gusto?

Behavioral needs

Although dog food might be filling and palatable and nutritionally appropriate, it may still not meet a dogs' food-related behavioral needs. Dogs are motivated to hunt, chase, stalk, scavenge, tear, and chew. Eating a bowl of kibble doesn’t satisfy any of these behavioral needs. As animal welfare researchers Andrew Knight and Liam Satchell have suggested, the way modern domesticated dogs are fed bears little resemblance to natural canid feeding behaviors.[i] Most notably, very few homed dogs rely on hunting to source their food. Moreover, under natural conditions, food availability would be somewhat unpredictable—dependent on killing prey or being near humans who have food. Being fed kibble at a predictable time every day is not natural, nor is free (or ad libitum) feeding. This lack of resemblance to natural feeding behavior creates some potential welfare problems for dogs.

Social feeding

The behavioral aspects of eating are also important to dogs and dog welfare will be improved if we can find ways to make the act of eating more closely resemble natural feeding behaviors. Knight and Satchell suggest, for example, that because dog and human feeding behaviors were closely linked throughout our co-evolution—with dogs successfully scavenging leftovers from humans—allowing dogs to eat at the same time as the human family may provide beneficial social enrichment. This runs counter to a common but misguided piece of dog training folklore, which warns that there must be strictly enforced boundaries between when and what dogs eat and when and what humans eat.

Food-related problem-solving

Knight and Satchell also recommend facilitating dogs’ appetitive problem-solving behaviors by asking them to “work” for food, whether by gathering kibble that has been scattered across the floor or by working through a puzzle feeder. (Appetitive behavior refers to active, exploratory, seeking behavior which increases the likelihood that an organism will satisfy a need. Appetitive behavior precedes consummatory behavior.)

Chewing

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As Knight and Satchell’s remarks suggest, dogs have behavioral needs related to feeding which extend beyond the ingestion of calories. One of these related needs is chewing. A 2020 paper by veterinary researcher Christine Arhant and her colleagues Rebecca Winkelmann and Josef Troxler explores why chewing is behaviorally relevant. Looking at the feeding patterns of free-ranging dogs, which they consider the ecologically relevant analog of the domestic dog’s feeding behavior, we see that about half of their diet comes from carcasses. Eating carcasses requires a lot of chewing—an average of 26 minutes of chewing during a meal. Dogs’ behavioral motivation to dissect and chew dead animals will not likely be satisfied by eating a bowl of kibble. [ii] I’ve timed Bella eating her morning bowl of kibble and it takes her roughly two minutes to consume her meal, and there is very little chewing involved. How can I make up for the other 24 minutes of lost chewing opportunity?

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One option for meeting a dog’s behavioral needs around food would be to supply carcasses as a supplement to kibble. But, like me, you might find this an ethically and aesthetically undesirable choice. The next best alternative is to provide acceptable (to humans) chewing material. Providing chewing opportunities and materials, though, presents, another set of potential risks and benefits dog guardians must navigate. Chewing may improve dental health; it may also damage dogs’ teeth. Chewing can reduce stress and meet a behavioral need; chewing on objects can also be an indicator of negative emotional states. Chewing can cause serious medical issues if dogs swallow non-digestible objects such as socks and plastic squeakers, which they seem inclined to do. Opinions about which chewing materials are best are all over the board. For example, some will tout raw bones because they allow a dog to tap into her inner wolf; others say that raw bones will make dogs ill and will crack their teeth.

Find out what your dog likes and needs

Fortunately, our dogs are willing subjects when it comes to experimenting with foods and feeding patterns—they will likely be very happy to indulge us.

Here are a few resources to get you started:

• Knight and Satchel’s article on palatability and feeding behaviors is open access and can be found here.
• Arhant et al.’s research on chewing behavior is also open access and can be found here.
• Tufts Pedfoodology website has numerous articles about how and what to feed, written by veterinary nutrition specialists.