Why does my dog eat his food so fast?

If your dog inhales his food like a Hover vacuum cleaner, then you know the struggle. Eating too fast can result in choking, gagging, vomiting and swallowing excessive air, which causes bloating (accumulation of gas in the stomach). So it’s important to slow down your dog’s eating habits.

Índice Show

Spread Out the Goodness
Slow Feed Dog Bowls
Interactive Dinner Toys
How to Slow Down a Dog Who Eats Too Fast

For the most part, I’ve always shared my home with fast eating dogs, so I’ve gotten used to this behavior. However, just because I’m used to it doesn’t mean it’s allowed to happen. I take many precautions to stop my dogs from eating too fast, which I’ll happily share with you. 🙂

Spread Out the Goodness

By far, this is the easiest (and cheapest) way to make your dog eat slower. Take your dog’s daily meals and spread them out on a rug or smooth surface. At first, you should make it easy for your dog to eat by sprinkling food in clumps on your cement patio (weather permitting).

Once he gets really good at eating his food spread out, increase the distance between the kibble by fanning out his food in a larger smooth-surfaced area. By increasing the distance between the kibble, you’re forcing your dog to search for each kibble. To make it even harder, sprinkle his kibble on a large rug where he must hunt through the fibers for his food. This makes a great rainy day game. If you want to make it even more challenging, sprinkle his kibble in a shag rug. It could easily take 30 minutes for him to find all his food.

Refrain from tossing your dog’s kibble in the yard. It’s very difficult for your dog to find each and every piece plus it attracts ants and rodents. Tossing your dog’s meals into your yard is like tossing a free meal out, which isn’t fair to your dog. Don’t be surprised if your dog starts fighting wildlife once he learns you give out his meals on a daily basis.

Slow Feed Dog Bowls

Slow feed dog bowls are flat on the bottom and usually contain lots of hiding places for your dog’s food. You fill these dishes with food and place them on the ground during meal times. While they’re interactive, they don’t move. They sit in place like your dog’s regular food bowl.

Lately, there’s been an explosion of dog food bowls promising to slow your dog’s eating habits, but I don’t believe these bowls work for all dogs. Most dogs that eat fast slightly suffer from an underlying anxiety, which can cause them frustration while trying to chase or lick food trapped between barriers and crevices. If they can’t get to the food fast enough, most dogs will flip over the food bowl to gain access, then it’s a feeding frenzy.

If you decide to give an interactive feeding dog bowl a whirl, make sure it’s big enough for your dog. Choosing a dog bowl too small will surely cause frustration. When introducing your dog’s new dish, make the game easy in the beginning–no one wants to keep chipping away at a new game that’s way too hard, especially when you’re hungry!

Interactive Dinner Toys

These dog toys are filled with your dog’s daily meals. You give them to your dog with which he can chew, paw and lick clean. For the most part, these toys promote gnawing and chewing, which is very satiating and will certainly extend dinner meals from 10 seconds to 20 minutes, depending on the chosen toy.

When introducing an interactive dinner toy, make the game easy for the first few days. Loosely sprinkle food inside and outside the toy, so your dog learns to associate food with the toy. Over the next few days, start to tightly pack food in by using peanut butter or wet food as a binder. My favorite interactive dinner toy is the Kong Wobbler. It’s really good!

Try rotating between each option to make eating even more challenging for your dog. Soon your dog will learn to enjoy eating slowly!

Some dogs eat so fast that a reasonable person would bet good money that they either think their speediness will make a steak appear, or they think they only have 60 seconds before their kibble self-destructs. Many dogs do this throughout their lives without a problem — but they are flirting with disaster.

Eating so quickly doesn’t allow dogs to chew or even really taste their food. More worrisome is that a dog speed eating can cause choking, gagging, vomiting, and an even more serious condition called Gastric Dilation (colloquially known as bloat). Canine bloat can result from a dog eating too much or too fast. The stomach expands because gasses build up to the point that the stomach can twist within the dog’s abdomen, preventing the gasses from escaping. The result: Circulation can be cut off to the stomach as well as to other organs including the heart. Dogs can die within hours of the onset of bloat, so it is a serious condition that requires immediate emergency medical attention if you suspect it. The bottom line? Eating fast is more than unsightly — it’s potentially dangerous.

How to Slow Down a Dog Who Eats Too Fast

I am regularly asked how to train a dog to eat more slowly, and my answer is that it’s easier to make it physically impossible for them to eat that fast than it is to train them to eat slowly. There are a lot of ways to do this, but they all use the same principle: Set up a system that doesn’t allow them to eat more than a little bit of food at a time.

There are a lot of commercial options out there for slow feed dog bowls, but let’s start with a DIY slow-eating dog bowl solution. Place one small bowl upside down inside a big bowl and then pour the food over the small bowl and into the bigger one. That creates a narrow “moat” of food so your dog can’t gulp the entire meal down. They have to work their way around the entire circle of food.

Another option is to place toys that are too big to swallow (and that are clean!) in a food bowl so the dog has to move them out of the way or work around them to reach the food. It’s also common for people whose dogs tend to eat a bowl of food in a matter of seconds to scatter the food over a broad area so the dog has to move around for each piece of food. This works very well in houses with a single dog. If more than one dog is around, this option is a poor choice because it promotes competition, stress, and can lead to aggression over the food.

My favorite way to keep dogs from scarfing down their food too quickly is to use a dog food puzzle or slow feeder dog bowl that is specific to this purpose. Food puzzles are often loud, but many dogs will work for a long time to roll or push a Kong Wobbler around to get the food to fall out. Some people even use snuffle mats for fast eaters. Not only does this slow down their eating, but it also provides mental exercise and gives dogs valuable experience being persistent and handling a bit of frustration. Never a bad thing, right? Check out our list of the best dog food puzzles; if a slow feeder dog bowl is more your speed, there are many options out there:

Outward Hound Fun Feeder Slo Bowl

$11

This bowl can slow down your pup's eating by 10X. It’s made in three different sizes and can safely hold wet or dry food, so you can easily cater to your dog’s individual dietary needs. The ridges will keep your pup engaged with their meal while regulating their pace.

$11 at Walmart

Outward Hound Fun Feeder Slo Bowl

This bowl can slow down your pup’s eating by 10X. It’s made in three different sizes and can safely hold wet or dry food, so you can easily cater to your dog’s individual dietary needs. The ridges will keep your pup engaged with their meal while regulating their pace.

$8 at Chewy

Trot has reimagined puzzle feeders with magnetically secured stainless steel bowls on an elevated anti-spill silicone mat, making clean-up jobs easy and harder to come by. Beyond that, a percentage of every purchase goes towards the Little Angels Project, which helps injured animals in shelters gain proper access to medical care and find loving permanent homes.