Kibble hunting in the flat

Donna does not like kibble. She doesn’t. Period.

To demonstrate, I thought I will take pictures of my left hand offering kibble to her and she will show a disgusted face, sort of like this one when she refused to touch the toy car the other day.

See that’s what she does, sniff… telepathically send the “you want me to eat that??? Ur-g-hh” message as she pointedly looks away.

So here goes my left hand with the kibble… and of course she is going to sniff and raise her eyebrow at me…

… wait…”Crunch crunch”… wait a second… did she just eat the kibble?

She just ate the kibble! *I refused to take a picture of my stunned face.*

In the last couple of months, we’ve bought Canidae Grain-free Pure Sky, TOTW Pacific Stream and Wellness Core Reduced Fat Formula kibble for her. All of which she looked at with snorts of disdain. And just now she took a Fromm Dog Pork and Applesauce kibble without batting an eyelid! Are you joking me?

So I thought let’s test again.

… stupid dog ate the kibble.

I suppose I should be happy we finally found kibble that she actually liked enough to eat on its own without us having to top it with wet food, milk, yoghurt or tuna etc, etc.

So now you just have to be satisfied with not seeing her highness’ icy disdain which I had originally planned as a prelude to telling you the other silly game we play to get her to eat kibble on her own = =!

Sigh. Foiled by my dog.

Anyway back to the story of making it fun for Donna to eat kibble. I wrote this a month ago when Donna was still refusing to eat kibble, probably should have published it sooner, rather than later. (This is so not enjoyable, since there doesn’t seem to be a point to it now, is there?)

So anyway, about a month or more ago we started playing the kibble hunting game with Donna. It started because after a walk, Donna appeared too tired or lazy to want to get her food out of her Kong Genius Leo by herself. Or sometimes it rained too heavily in the morning and we opted to go for a quick loo break rather than a morning walk. We needed to find some way to run off that excess energy so that she does not get bored and then destructive if we had to leave her alone at home.

We already knew that Donna gets excited chasing after the kibble that fall out of her Kong Genius Leo. So on those mornings when she was too lazy to jump around with her Kong, I sat in the middle of the living room  with a ration of her kibble and threw it one by one and she ran after them. It totally worked. It was quite amazing actually, I could understand chasing after food that you like, but chasing after food that you don’t? I can’t explain it but it worked with her. So good!

You decide how far, how fast and the direction you throw the kibble. And that determined the distance and speed the dog covers during this short exercise. Generally, start slow and build up. After the 5th kibble, Donna typically starts running up to the kibble and crunching it. Yes, the dog did not eat kibble then. She did not seem to use her sense of smell as much as her ears to hear the kibble skipping across the tiles and her eyes to see where the kibble lands before running to lap it up. The more praise and the faster the kibble gets thrown, the more excited she gets, bounding to the left and right after kibble, her tail waving in the air.

But I am careful not to get her too excited because she chases the next kibble even when she hasn’t finished crunching the previous kibble and that could possibly lead to her choking on half-crunched kibble bits while bounding around in excitement.

After a while, she would slow down, possibly panting as she walked calmly to the thrown kibble. That will be my cue for dumping the remaining kibble into her bowl  topped up with a scoop of wet food so she would finish it.

Simple game, totally FREE, and gets her up on her feet and having fun. Not bad for breakfast interaction with the dog before we needed to get out of the house.

The downside? You find some gritty kibble crumbs underfoot but nothing sweeping the floor can’t solve.