My Lab Midnight loves to get treats.
We sometimes give her a tiny portion of our dinner – healthy things like small plain piece of boneless skinless chicken breast, raw carrots, green beans or other veggies- cooked or raw.
Of course she also likes chewing on real bones (beef bones purchased at pet store) and fake bones (nylabone for power chewers) and rawhide.
We actually like it when she’s busy chewing on one of her bones or a piece of rawhide because that means we have a few minutes of peace. Midnight really loves being, playing and interacting with us .. so it’s nice when we find something that can take her attention off of us for a while!
We started giving her a rawhide in the shape of a bone almost every night a few months ago. We never let her eat the whole large rawhide bone in one sitting though … it would be way too expensive to keep her stalked up in rawhide if we had! Instead we’d let her chew one end off and then take it away, then the next night the other knob and so on.
The only problem was that for most of this year her appetite for her regular food seems to have gone down a lot. Now she’s a Lab and they love to eat … so that’s a big problem! We started to wonder if she was sick, but she seems fine otherwise and she still will eat our human food treats or her cookies with the same excitement that she’s always had.
What I really think was happening is that the rawhide takes longer to digest than her regular dry dog food so she might have had a full feeling when presented with a big bowl of her own food. Also … she definitely likes our food better than her food … so that might be why she started to turn her nose up at her own food.
Over the last few weeks we’ve slowed down on the rawhide treats. We purchased small rawhide bones (about the size of your palm) and she only gets one every three days or so now. Her appetite for her regular food has picked up too.
Of course she still begs every night for her chew treats. She’ll actually sit and stare at me for hours with a look like “you’ve hurt me” on the nights that we don’t give her a rawhide. Darn dog!
