We have mentioned before that Horace is a problem when it comes to eating. He spends ages eating his food, just skipping around and scattering food everywhere, which he then can’t find. It can take him hours to eat his meals, which is why we cut him down from three meals a day to two, because it was taking most of the day with him eating – or not eating. As he is so small and a puppy it’s important that he does eat well, but he won’t eat anything other than the dry dog food and just isn’t interested in food.
So we’ve had a change of strategy and we’re now feeding him outside with the others, hoping that he might sort of catch on to the eating thing just from being around the others. Of course, he won’t see the others, and although he does hear some things, I’m not sure what he’ll pick up on, however it seems worth a try. This is the first time we fed him outside:
This is typical Horace behaviour, and this skipping goes on for hours, so the new plan is that perhaps he’ll be more focused if he is outside with others. This skipping went on for quite a while and then the other dogs (and Pirata) started paying hopeful attention:
And eventually they all gave up and wandered off, and even Rosie got bored and had to sit down while he finished;
Anyway, the good news is that this seems to be working. He did a bit of skipping this morning, but not quite as much and finished his meal within minutes as opposed to the hours it was taking before (but still a long way away from the seconds it takes the rest). So hopefully he’ll catch on to the fact he is eating with the big dogs now and we’ll be over this hurdle.
The vet has said that his jaw might be misaligned and you can see in the video he does seem to do odd things with his head when he eats. She said to give him soft food, but he just won’t eat it. We’ve even tried sneaking some little bits of sausage into his food, but he just eats around it! Don’t think any of our other dogs would do that!