My 2 year male Labrador has gotten into a habit of picking his food bowl and throwing it around the house. Whether it has food or not, he will go and pick it up and throw it every few hours. If the kibbles are there in the bowl, he loves to spread them all over the house and after I have picked each one and put them back in the bowl, he will eat a handful and after sometime do the same thing all over again. I notice he does not like eating at one go, like he used to do till a few months ago. Is this a play for him? How do I check this behavior? It's becoming too messy around the house and I really get tired picking the food each time...so many times a day.
Well you can pick his bowl up after each feed, even if he has not finished. Or not use a bowl at all for his meals but use stuffed kongs instead. It may seem annoying to have your lab throwing his bowl around, but it is not uncommon, specially when they can get into that zone after meals, I call it the labrador "happy hour". Switching the bowl for a toy, and having a game might help as a distraction.
I pick up bowls after meals or my puppy starts throwing them around. You don't need to feed any food in his bowl; it's not very interesting for dogs to be given food this way, even though most will gobble it up quite happily. But, when my puppy wasn't interested in her food when she was young, I would scatter her meal around her pen, which got her more interested. I'd also hide it around the room and have her search it out, which she loved. Much of her daily allowance comes from training rewards, so she hardly gets anything in a bowl.
