Why is hand feeding your dog bad? The Ultimate Guide

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Hand Feeding Creates a Strong Bond With Your Dog

Hand feeding can help new dogs bond quickly with new owners. If you’ve recently added a new dog to your family doing some hand feeding is a great way to start building up your new relationship. (be sure to check out these other 9 tips for helping your dog adjust to his new home)

It’s a simple way to gain a dogs trust, especially for shy or fearful dogs.

Hand Feeding Builds Up Your Dogs Focus

Hand feeding your dog is an easy way to get your dog to focus more on you. It’s not an answer to all behavioral issues but it will build trust in your relationship. If you have a brand new puppy hand feeding creates a quick, strong bond with your new companion.

If you’ve ever seen those dogs doing agility and were jealous of how much attention they were giving to their owners chances are some of them have definitely been hand fed. It’s a common training technique for dogs in obedience class, those practicing agility, and many service dogs in training.

Hand feeding is a great way to teach your dog to have manners around food and it helps them develop some basic impulse control.

Hand Feeding

Feeding your dog out of your hands is a great way to promote bonding and work on bite inhibition. This is especially great for puppies, as they’ll learn to control their teeth around your fingers. New and shy dogs also benefit tremendously from hand feeding – definitely give it a try!

  • Start by putting some of your dog’s kibble in your cupped hand.
  • If you feel the sharp end of a canine or incisor on your hand, close your hand. It’s ok if you feel the flat side of teeth as your dog eats.
  • Open your hand enough that your dog can easily lick kibble out of the opening in your hand.
  • Your puppy will quickly learn that she needs to be gentle in order to earn her meals!
  • I think of my hand like a Kong and shape it so that puppies need to lick instead of bite to get the kibble out of my hand. I’ve actually used this to teach bite inhibition to sharky puppies!

    • The benefits of hand-feeding a dog?

    Hand-feeding dogs is not a bad thing. In fact, many trainers recommend it for dogs who have a guarding problem, are way too dominating or feel very territorial around their food.

    If your dog snaps whenever someone puts a hand in their bowl, you must teach them to relax. It will prove quite beneficial, especially if you have kids in the house. But the key here is moderation. We want to teach our dogs to be independent and co-exist at the same time. If you are hand feeding your dog to teach them to co-exist, it great, but if you do it too often you can make them co-dependent – and that’s where the problem begins.

    The trick is to be able to get in their food bowl but still being able to leave them alone during meal times so that they can eat on their own.

    If your dog has come to a point that they won’t eat anything unless they are hand-fed, you are probably wondering why they can’t eat on their own.