What if my dog isn’t food motivated?

One of the reasons I picked a golden retriever as a service dog prospect was their famously high food motivation. So imagine my shock and horror when my puppy turned her nose up at roasted chicken during training sessions and flat out refused to eat her kibble. After a totally normal and respectable amount of panicking, I consulted with my trusted colleagues and got a plan together to tackle the issue head on. Thanks to a few small changes, I’m happy to report that Mouse is now consistently and enthusiastically eating across the board, and will even work for kibble in places as hectic as theme parks!

So how did we do it? If you ask some dog professionals what to do if your dog isn’t food motivated, you’ll get a snarky answer along the lines of “if your dog really wasn’t food motivated, he’d be dead.” Which is fair enough, every dog will eventually eat from that bowl of kibble they seem to hate, but that isn’t especially actionable. Every dog is different and we of course can’t give you a specific training plan in blog form, but here are our top tips for navigating “low food drive.”

Investigate Wellness

If a dog is routinely skipping meals or spitting out treats, it is critical that we first investigate health and wellness. A dog who is uncomfortable or in pain isn’t always easy to spot. Lack of appetite, allergies and chronic GI upset (including frequent bouts of vomiting or loose stools) shouldn’t be brushed off as a unique quirk; these symptoms are communicating discomfort that deserve to be taken seriously and investigated by your veterinary team.

Similarly, chronic stress and anxiety will frequently impact a dog’s appetite or ability to eat. When a dog’s sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”) is activated, their parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”) becomes less active. Think about how you might feel nauseous in anticipation of a big presentation or other stressful event. Working with a qualified behavior consultant to reduce your dog’s stressors will likely improve their food eating ability. Which, in turn, paves the way for more effective behavior modification.

Treat Eating as a Behavior

Even though eating seems like a fairly automatic process, it is still an operant behavior. Meaning, it’s something your dog is doing voluntarily to access an outcome (in this case: feeling satiated). As strange as it may seem, sometimes we do need to take the time to build some fluency in eating as a skill! This is a good place to pause and collect some data about your specific dog. Where and when is eating most likely to happen? Where and when is it least likely to happen? If your dog takes treats in the house but not on walks, exactly how far into the walk do they stop?

Having consistent and clear marker signals so your dog knows exactly where and how food will be available can go a long way. Is your dog coming to you for the food? Are you bringing the food to them? Do they get to catch or chase a thrown piece of food? Will they be searching for food in the grass or on a snuffle mat? Take the time to have a few training sessions just dedicated to the art of treat eating! With my dog Mouse, we built up her kibble eating behavior in part by practicing a spliced down version at home. We put one or two kibbles in a bowl for her and presented it. When she finished that, we placed something better in the bowl (beef liver). Over time we gradually added more and more kibble, until she was enthusiastically scarfing her bowl.

Start High, End Low

A common strategy to combat low food drive is to try and up the ante with extra special treats. Sometimes a little experimentation to find your dog’s favorites genuinely is the answer! We do want to make sure we are working with something the dog enjoys, and each dog is going to come with different opinions. A lab might do backflips for dry milkbones, while a more discerning pup doesn’t find them palatable. We have worked with plenty of dogs who consistently polished off their bowls of kibble upon switching to a different brand or flavor. But if you’re reading this, we’ll bet you have already tried breaking out the chicken hearts and mozzarella cheese. 

Rather than starting with your lowest value food and only upon facing rejection reaching for the better stuff, we are going to encourage you to reverse that. Start with your highest value food available, and gradually start to mix in some of the medium value treats. The goal here is to prime the pumps and get eating occurring with the things your dog is most likely to want. We also want to avoid inadvertently teaching our dogs to spit out kibble so the humans reach for the boiled chicken.

Don’t Get Weird & Beware Poisoning

Let’s say you offer your dog their favorite treat only to have it fall immediately out of their mouth. It’s okay! Behavior is information, and your dog is giving you valuable data. Resist the temptation to try and convince your dog to eat the treat. Adding pressure to the situation by escalating your energy, bringing the food to your dog’s mouth repeatedly or encroaching on their personal space will likely backfire. For more sensitive pups, it might put them off with taking treats altogether. 

It is, unfortunately, fairly easy to “poison” food by building anticipation of an unwanted consequence into the behavior of eating. A common example of this is grabbing a lick mat to distract your dog right before you grab the nail clippers. As your dog starts to put the pieces together, you might start to see avoidant or even stressed behaviors at the lick mat itself.

Poisoning can also be more subtle. In my dog Mouse’s case, she historically found food less intrinsically motivating than access to strangers. I used all of my typical protocols to try working on orienting to me around new people, and was very distraught to find that Mouse was spitting out food earlier and earlier in the process. It was only then that I realized that Mouse had learned eating food predicted not getting to say hello to people. My attempts to shovel food into her mouth were only digging our hole deeper, and it took an overhaul of our training plan to fix the issue.

Build Alternative Reinforcement Strategies

While we really do love using food in training, and we want to address any wellness-related concerns around food, we can also start building up alternative reinforcement strategies. We can incorporate anything your dog finds motivating into training sessions, from toys and play to access to the environment. This is another area where a little bit of data collection on what your dog loves can go a long way. (Fun fact: much of Mouse’s loose leash walking skills were taught with crunching leaves.) 

At the end of the day, behavior is information. It can be tempting to resort to more punitive methods to fix a behavior problem when your dog doesn’t seem to respond to much else. A dog who is refusing food can be communicating a lot of different things, so it’s up to us to stay curious. If you need help kick-starting your “picky” dog’s training, we’re always happy to help!