Feeding Multiple Dogs at the Same Time
Canine Behavior Series
Keeping dogs together who fight is miserable for them as well as for their human family members. It also gets expensive in medical costs, both veterinary and human ones. A dog who has had to defend food from another animal may start defending it from humans, resulting in dog bites to family members, children in particular.
Dogs who would never start fighting with each other for any other reason will often start over food. Too often, the fighting among the dogs extends to other situations if the humans don’t act quickly enough.
The best way to handle this—the safest all the way around—is to establish a system in your home of feeding each dog in a noncompetitive manner right from the start. The ideal family dog doesn’t even have reason to think about the possibility of anyone taking that food away.
Chances are you don’t know about every eating experience your dog has had. Even a dog you adopted as a puppy may have been pushed around excessively by other pups in the litter after the pups started on solid food. Genetics also influence how easily a dog will become defensive of food. Obviously as a survival instinct, winning the fight and eating the food would determine which dog stays alive and thrives and which one starves, in situations where there is not enough food to go around.
Sometimes when dogs do okay eating together, it’s because there is no limit to the food. But what if the dog is really hungry, the other dog gets the food first, and it’s an hour before you notice and refill the dish? For some dogs, that would be enough of an experience to make it seem the resource of food is limited.
Competing with other dogs for food will cause some dogs to overeat. It will cause others to swallow food—and chew toys, which to a dog are also food—without chewing. The dog may throw up food eaten too quickly, or may swallow chunks of things that are too big to pass through. Veterinary expenses follow.
If you have one dog and have been just putting food into the dog’s dish as you notice it being empty, adding another dog means it’s time to change the feeding routine. By doing this, you ensure that each dog gets the correct amount and type of food, including medications mixed with the food if needed. And you reduce the risks of all the problems mentioned.
If you are currently feeding your dogs together, changing to separate feeding is important, whether you’ve already had problems or not. Even if you’ve fed your dogs together for years, tomorrow may be the day it becomes a problem. Once that happens, your chances of one or more dogs developing dangerous behavior that will be difficult or impossible to reverse begin to climb.
Separation Options
To set up a system for feeding your multiple dogs, determine what it will take to get each dog safely into a separate spot, keep them safely undisturbed there to eat, and release them safely when finished so you won’t have a fight start then. Eventually it may become safe to let them check each other’s dishes when all are emptied, but it’s best not to start out that way. You can avoid this problem by removing each dog’s dish out of reach of all the dogs before you give them access to each other’s feeding areas.
Don’t let the dogs charge out like racehorses leaving their starting gates! Too much excitement at this point in the routine can trigger a fight. Heavy exercise after a big meal is suspected as a risk factor for often fatal (and expensive) gastric torsion.
In fact, being agitated, especially at mealtime, is thought to increase a dog’s risk of gastric torsion. So when your dogs are eating and after they have eaten, they should relax. Make that a goal of your feeding system. You can see that this is yet another reason to take competition out of the feeding process.
If you have crates, you can feed the dogs in those. You don’t have to feed all the dogs in crates. If you can get the dogs safely separated, keep them that way until they have finished eating, and then release and reunite them safely and calmly; quite a variety of systems can work. But be realistic about their level of training as well as the ability of the person who is supervising the dogs.
Separate rooms with closed doors between the dogs can work. If dog A is in the bathroom and dog B is in the kitchen, with either a closed door or a safety gate to keep each dog in the right room until released, here’s how you could proceed:
1. Give both dogs a chance to eliminate. Many dogs cannot eat without first doing this and it takes emotional pressure off them, too.
2. Put dog A in the bathroom and confine.
3. Prepare the dog dishes.
4. Confine dog B in the kitchen. If you have more than two dogs, handle each of the others the same way.
5. Take dog A’s food dish in and give to the dog.
6. Deliver dog B’s food dish.
7. Monitor to see when both dogs are finished, or when the designated time has passed. Dogs will learn to eat the food when offered if you limit the time it’s available. In the case of a picky eater, ask your veterinarian to help you decide what a good time limit is: it’s probably between 10 and 20 minutes.
8. The release is easiest to do safely if you have a fenced yard. Open the back door. You can increase comfort in the house by having some airflow protection at the back door, such as a drape you can pull across the open doorway. A doggie door you can latch and unlatch works, too.
9. Which dog to release first depends partly on the floor plan of your home. If the dogs go through the kitchen to get out the door, you’ll need to release dog B first, the one who ate in the kitchen. But you don’t want dog B to follow you and fight with dog A over dog A’s dish! So, go pick up dog A’s dish and put it out of the dogs’ reach before you release either dog. Pick up dog B’s dish, too, and open the back door so dog B can go outside. Then go open the bathroom door and escort dog A outside.
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Keep in mind that after feeding in a crate, a dog needs to exit that crate calmly—and in fact, it is important to teach dogs to always exit the crate calmly. For the purpose of this discussion, a calm exit reduces the risks of fighting and of gastric torsion, but it has a lot of other benefits, too.
Feeding in the crate is almost always a good fallback position. It’s hard to go wrong doing this. It helps shape a dog’s thinking that it is not a place for elimination. But if you do feed your dog in a crate, also feed in other places occasionally.
In fact, do that no matter where you routinely feed a dog. Otherwise some dogs will become so accustomed to their usual place that they will refuse food anyplace else. This can put the dog’s health at risk when traveling, hospitalized, or being cared for by someone else.
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Handling your multiple dogs correctly at feeding time may save them from having to be permanently separated and one or more of them re-homed. That is a common outcome of fights that start over food and spill over into other issues.
As so often happens in training and behavior modification work with dogs, what could have been a weakness can be turned into a great strength. Every time you feed your dogs can renew their good structure as a group. It doesn’t take any extra effort—in fact, it’s easier. Handling feeding time this way makes it more relaxed and enjoyable for every member of the family, including the canine ones.
