The dog must respect the food.
This is one of the Dog Whisperer’s top rules. I had had a food-aggressive terrier growing up, and I had no intention of repeating that experience. “My dog will never try to bite me,” I vowed.
So starting on Day One, I put the bowl of food on the floor behind me, and sat I front of it, facing Pudgy. He craned what now seemed like a giraffe-length neck around me, nose twitching fervently, eyes wide with excitement, with no other thought in mind except for that delicious bowl of food that lay behind this person who for the last several hours since he met her had been referring to herself as “mommy.”
The goal of this exercise was to wait until the dog relaxed into a calm state of mind before handing the food over. I think that my patience wore out faster than Pudgy’s on that first day, and after about twenty minutes of excited tail wags and paw pats, he received his food anyway.
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Things gradually got easier. After a week or so, I got my wiggly little puppy to stay still for at least a minute or two before giving him his food, though there was still that wild excitement in his eyes as he waited to pounce on the dish like a tiger on a gazelle. It took a few months to get to that perfect point, where Pudgy would sit still, with only a slight tension in his body, and now look at mommy instead of at the bowl, waiting on her word, a softly spoken “okay,” before devouring his meal.
I made it a practice to always feed him after our walk. Soon enough, as soon as we returned from our walks, he would scamper into his cage, usually sliding his butt into the side of the crate with a loud clang as he hurried to get into a sitting position and await his dinner. There he would sit, with perfect posture, not moving a muscle, as I prepared his food and presented it to him. Then he would wait, looking at me to give him the go sign. At first, I would make him wait a few minutes, just to practice good manners. After a while, it was just a moment and then I would motion him toward his food. He would never, ever touch it without permission, and if I said “okay” a little too softly, he would look at me and arch his ears as if to say “I didn’t catch that, is it okay now?” And I would have to repeat it before he would take his food.
And that is one of the many ways in which Pudgy soon became the perfect dog.