Dog Community

How to train leaving food

Posted : 11/26/2007 2:14:03 PM

The trick in this one is to train a dog to leave food indefinitely. Once in the past, someone threw cooked bones over our fence when no one was home. Understandably, the dogs all chowed down. Problem was, Penny has particularly narrow bowels and is prone to blockages, so this resulted in several trips to the vet before it was cleared up, and a few hundred dollars it would have been nice to spend on something other than fixing a potentially deadly problem caused by someone either being malicious or not knowing any better. We can't be there all the time. Similarly, there is an underground pet trade in this country, and dogs with guard potential especially can be targeted by thieves. I feel like it wouldn't hurt to try to teach dogs to leave food they find lying around. I've heard of people in sheep country teaching dogs not to take poisoned baits they find lying around by putting tobacco in a piece of meat and letting them find it, thus teaching the dog not to eat food it finds lying around. I'm not sure if that's a reliable method, and it also seems pretty extreme to me. Does anyone have any other ideas?

mrv

Posted : 11/26/2007 2:19:36 PM

What comes to my mind is the ring sport food refusal exercise. I have known dogs that would take/eat food only with a release word. I have also owned a dog whose main objective in life was to swallow anything she found before I could stop her. I think it is a bit about temperment/personality as well as training. I also know a rabbit beagle who is trained for obedience who will hold anything in her mouth and not swallow until given a command.

Chuffy

Posted : 11/27/2007 7:27:37 AM

I think leaving lots of booby trapped food lying around in various places would be best... combined with managing them so they definately have no access to anything left lying around, including stuff thrown over the fence... ever. Not sure if tobacco is the best booby trap though.... and the downside is, a smart dog will be able to tell a non-booby-trapped bit of food.

I'm not convinced teaching food refusal using obedience training would hold out if they were unsupervised and food was kying around for a considerable time. Honestly, I'd just manage this one. You might be able to convince a puppy not to touch food that is not in his bowl or something along those lines, but trying to get any sort of reliability this late when they've already been strongly rewarded for scavenging.... I wouldn't like to bet my dog's life on that.

corvus

Posted : 11/28/2007 3:32:49 AM

I would prefer management, but it's hard to manage an unknown neighbour tossing food over the fence when no one is around. And it's hard to manage something that may or may not happen. I don't think it's fair on a dog to keep them locked up when I'm not around on the off-chance someone chucks something potentially dangerous into the yard for them. I'm not going to bother trying with the current dogs, but I'm wondering if it's worth trying with a puppy.