Structured Feeding
Training Tip by Brandy Girot
What’s structured feeding?
The idea of structured feeding is that the dog is working for the meal in someway. there are expectations and criteria that must be met before the dogs allowed to eat, but this is not an exercise in human dominance but rather mutual respect.
We teach and cover structured feeding in our core classes. It makes such a difference in a dogs willingness to work for the human and it makes training your dog easier. this is especially true in puppies, as it is a lot easier to shape this behavior from the beginning of their life.
So, what are the benefits of structured feeding?
Practicing this method of feeding, helps to make the human handler relevant to the dog. If the human handler has little to no importance from the dog’s perspective, everything in the relationship is more challenging, from behavior to training. This is especially true for behavior cases. When we go into a clients home to work with severe behavior cases, this is the first thing that we change and 95% of the time we find that these dogs are free fed, meaning the owner just continually fills a bowl creating a 24 seven all you can eat buffet. The dog never has an understanding of where their food comes from.
Usually within a week of making this change, changes in the dogs behavior also start to happen. I am definitely not saying that structured feeding is a Fix all, however, it is an extremely important component in the relationship, part of the dog human bond.
Another benefit to structured feeding is that it builds impulse control in dogs. That’s what really gets a lot of dogs in trouble is that they just never learn to control themselves. We build impulse control by asking for basic obedience cues before they eat. The better the dog gets at this game the the more criteria we can add.
Structured feeding creates 2 to 3 times a day to train your dog and practice impulse control.
We start with a simple sit. the dog must sit as we put the food bowl on the floor. If the dog stands up and approaches the bowl, we quickly pick it up. We keep doing this up and down motion and most dogs quickly learn that the bowl will hit the ground if they keep their bum on the ground. Once we are able to put the bowl down and stand up, we give the dog a release word such as break or free meaning they can eat.
Once the dog understand the game with a simple sit and stay, that’s when you can really start adding criteria. You can ask for downs, you can ask for stays, you can ask for tricks, be creative you can ask for anything you want to practice before releasing the dog to eat. The impulse control part starts to develop when you start to add duration meaning you vary the amount of time that you ask your dog to hold a cue before releasing.
One question we often get when people try to make the transition to this method of feeding the dog is that well my dog just takes a few pieces and then walks away. Or my dog won’t eat when I put the bowl down.
What we instruct these owners to do is to go through the motions of the impulse control part of the exercise, put the bowl down and give the dog about 10 minutes. If the dog walks away, you pick the food bowl up and you don’t give it back until the next meal time. At the next meal time, you don’t feed a double portion, you present a single portion, and repeat this process. A healthy dog will not starve itself, and it is very common for a dog to skip several meals until they understand the rules of the game and then they become the most eager eaters each time their bowl is put down, and they tend to work very hard for their food.
A final aspect that is awesome about this way of feeding your dog is that you know how much kibble a day your dog is actually eating. Dogs that free fed are often overweight, and this causes all kinds of health issues, and it’s hard on their bones and joints.
here is a link to a video if you’d like to see more about structured feeding.