Hi there,
I was just wondering, my dogs have a habit of always randomly eating their bikkies when I come outside. They have free access to bikkies all day and get meat at dinner time and they’ll eat their bikkies throughout the day but if they’re laying down and I come outside they get all excited and start eating. Do you know why they do this??
Hi!
So this is one of those issues with lots of theories but no proven answers to! My theory is that they feel in some way this will please you and get them some attention. It could be that at one stage you praised them for eating their bikkies. It could be that you find the behavior somewhat amusing so you paid attention to them when they did it. The bottom line is that they think it will get your attention, so they continue to do it. They probably are not particularly interested in the dry food, so only eat what they really need to sustain. Incidentally dogs are not ‘grazers’ by nature. If you did want to stop the behavior, you should just put their food down for 10 minutes, and then pick it up and not feed them again till their regularly scheduled meal time. If they are hungry, they will eat. If it doesn’t bother you there is no need to change anything, just chalk it up to your individual dogs idiosyncrasies!
Beth Jeffreys
