Quote: Carol Boche

Sometimes a dog just cannot seem to slow down...

Ah. You've met my piggy-dogs, have you?

Hee hee, Connie are you starving your dogs?? Clearly that's what they're telling you

My pup used to be terrible in terms of inhaling. Both his parents were raw fed their whole lives and he was weaned onto raw so you'd think he would've learned to eat... apparently not.

Anyway, he ate so voraciously that I (as a nervous newbie raw-feeder ) used to worry that he wasn't getting enough.
I kept adding to his portions until his belly looked like it contained a basketball after each meal.
He still continued inhaling... watching my 3-month-old pup swallow whole chicken thighs without so much as a bite was so freaking nerve-wracking.

I had to resort to either holding his food (which resulted in many a puncture wound on my hand, darned razor puppy teeth!), or smashing at his meaty bones with a cleaver and mallet until they were pancake-flat.
So basically, I would come out of each meal either bloody from the holes poked into my hands by his teeth, or covered in bits of flesh, bone and blood from smashing his food up


Then one day he magically cured himself!

Don't know what happened, but he suddenly stopped inhaling his food, slowed down and ate all his meals like a little gentleman

Maybe his body finally got around to telling his brain that he wasn't anywhere near starving, or maybe he just took pity on me and my hands and clothes (lol).

So if you're lucky your puppy will outgrow that habit.

Then again some dogs never do... hehehe

 Quote: Yuko Blum

Hee hee, Connie are you starving your dogs?? Clearly that's what they're telling you

Yes. I have liar-dogs (who are ALSO piggy-dogs), all of whom will look at you with a starving-about-to-faint look right after inhaling two pounds of meat.

I used to believe them, too, when they said they were feeling peckish and needed a tad more to tide them over.

when i first started feeding raw (my dogs still don't get it all the time), one of them inhaled a whole chicken thigh - i seem to recall it being because a cat walked around the corner. i did notice a few chunks of bone in her stool, but as mentioned in a previous post on this thread, no lethargy or anything like that, same great appetite next day, we never bothered to make the trip to the vet.

personally, i've often wondered whether tying/nailing/attaching the food to something larger and immovable (a fencepost maybe?) would have any affect? would work better for like a whole chicken carcass i'd imagine, but it was a passing thought.

I don't have the smarts to feed raw yet, but I do have a 14 week old Big-Gulp. Since I feed kibble, I'm not that worried about what you are, but I was concerned (paranoid?!?) about bloat.

My big Kong holds about a cup of dry kibble. So I'd put that in with a thin layer of peanut butter over the top, mushed into the kibble. It's really slowed him down AND had the benefit of him looking at his Kong as a chew toy, which he wasn't before.

Not sure how this would help your situation (but funny mental images). Just thought I'd throw this in.

Jamie, I actually tried out your idea a few times in the past.

I didn't use nails, just ice

I had some turkey wings on hand a couple of weeks ago and wanted to feed them to my pup... I normally avoid wings but they were available so it seemed like a shame to let them go to waste.
At the same time I wanted to be sure that he wouldn't gulp them, even though he hasn't been doing that in a while. (Turkey wings are big and I didn't want to risk him going back to his gulping habit and choking )

Anyway, in the evening I dug a tiny hole into the snow on my deck, enough to stick about half a turkey wing into it. I then poured some cold water into the hole and left it for the night.
(Also covered it up with the top of a rabbit wire cage so nothing would come eat the wing during the night, hehe).

In the morning the wing was solidly frozen into the hard snow!
Looked like a little popsicle sticking out of the ground.
Pup tried to yank it out but it was frozen into place, so he just lay down and nibbled methodically on the part sticking out.

When he finished eating that above-ground portion of the wing, he just kept licking and chewing at the snow until he got the rest. Worked perfectly

Then again it did take him a while to finish his breakfast that day, so probably best to try that out when you're not in a hurry, haha.

feed frozen. makes them work harder. also, feed whole or half or even quarter chickens. when feeding large pieces to slow them down, make sure you don't feed larger than they really should eat for one meal. i've heard of raw-fed dogs who bloated, and it was often from eating too much.

When I first started feeding my then 12 yr old (14 lb) terrier raw, he got a whole leg quarter. He was wolfing it down, then yacking up the thigh for the first few meals. I then started beating it with a hammer before I served it. No more problem!

What do you all think about serving cornish game hens to smaller breed dogs that tend to gulp, since the bones are so much smaller than chicken? Just wondering if that would be a good thing or not. At my grocer's they sometimes go on sale for $2.99 (regular $3.99) each hen, weighing 1 1/2 lbs each. Don't know how much a Beagle pup would eat per day, but shouldn't be too expensive if a pup ate half of a game hen per day?

My dogs (all large) get game hens. The whole thing. They all eat slow though. I think smaller dogs do okay with them too, as long as they are not gulpers.