1
Answers Home
» Food & Nutrition
» Other Food & Nutrition
Little bit of a feeding problem... Conflict with free feed AND scheduled feed. Help?
So, he's my problem... I adopted a new dog to be a bit of a "chill pill" or "guide" for my deaf puppy, and she has been great. She's a 4 year old beagle, and aside from coming to me with a bacterial rash, everything seemed ok. Well, that was until mealtime. I'd been doing a scheduled feed, but soon as the new dog came my puppy refused to eat on a schedule. I figured it was just a phase, so I continued as usual, giving her 15 minutes to eat, and they were given 3 meals a day. The beagle will eat her meal in a matter of seconds, but my pup would pick a few bites then avoid it at all costs.
After a few weeks of this, I noticed the pup lost a drastic amount of weight, so I stopped and went to a free feed schedule. Since then, she has regained her weight and is as normal... however... my beagle is now looking on the verge of being overweight, and seems to want to eat anything and everything she can if the bowl has something in it, ESPECIALLY if the puppy wants to eat... Now what?
Asked by
Amaterasu
on Nov 27th 2011
Tagged
in Other Food & Nutrition
Status
- This question is closed.
Best Answer
Do you feed them together in the same room? Some dogs don't like eat with other dogs around (makes them nervous) and refuse to eat. I would go back to schedule-feeding, but separate them so they can't see each other. Keep them apart for at least ten minutes so puppy has a chance to relax and eat. That would also prevent the beagle from scrounging pup's food and getting fat.
You might try using something more enticing on pup's food to get her to eat faster- plain chicken broth, canned dog food, parmesan cheese... there's lots of options.
I think in the long run schedule feeding is better, especially with multiple dogs because you can track exactly how much they are eating daily.
Bruno answered on Nov 27th.
