Dr. Dunbar’s 28-Day Good Dog Challenge

No Food Bowl

How to turn your dog’s dinner into your most powerful training tool.

Why no bowl?

Every piece of kibble is a chance to say “Good Dog, thank you” for something your dog did right. Feed from a bowl, and all those chances disappear in seconds. And the more often food simply appears in a bowl, the less your dog will want to work for it.

A bowl also steals your dog’s job. In the wild, dogs spend much of their day foraging, nibbling, and hunting for food. Fed from a bowl two or three times a day, many dogs are left with nothing to do, especially when home alone. So they invent their own entertainment: chewing, barking, digging, and racing around. We call these “behavior problems.” To your dog, they’re perfectly normal, natural ways to pass the time.

How it works

1. Each morning, measure out your dog’s food for the day and put it in a jar or pouch. It’s the same amount they always eat, just served differently.
2. Hand-feed it throughout the day as lures and rewards for training, and for simply being good: glancing at you, sitting, or lying down calmly nearby.
3. Not interested? No worries. Try again later, when your dog is hungrier.
4. Any left over at bedtime? Hand-feed it to your dog for just being there with you, or stuff it into a chew toy (see below).

What hand-feeding teaches

Hand-feeding isn’t just a nicer way to serve dinner. It teaches two important lessons right from the start:

• Gently. Your dog learns to take food softly from your fingers.
• Patience. Hold a piece of kibble for just a moment, say “Good Dog,” and then give it. Little by little, make the pause a bit longer. That’s the very beginning of a Stay, and we’ll build on it with Stay-Delays later in the challenge.

Stuffed chew toys

At first, you may want to make it easy for your dog. Simply fill a hollow chew toy, like a Kong, with dry food. Give it to your dog and they'll quickly work out how to get the food out.

If you want them to spend more time and energy on a chew toy, simply soak kibble overnight and then stuff the mush into the Kong. Or, for a real challenge, freeze it overnight. Voilà: a Kongsicle for the next day.

As your dog works at the stuffed toy, every little piece they get out rewards them for lying down calmly and quietly with their chew toy. We call this AutoTraining. Your dog builds a good habit, chewing their own toy, and good habits are just as hard to break as bad ones.

Helpful tips

• Keep the daily total the same. Training food comes out of your dog’s daily allowance, not on top of it.
• Big pieces of kibble? Break them in half, or even smaller. Smaller rewards mean more rewards.
• Special diet or a health condition? Check with your vet before changing how your dog is fed.
• More than one dog? Hand-feed and train them one at a time, while the others enjoy a stuffed chew toy. Or, for extra motivation, train them at the same time and only one dog gets the reward! Only for dogs who are relaxed around food.
• Does your dog grab at your hand? On Day 5, we’ll teach Off & Take It, so they learn to take food gently.

Teaching your dog English

In a sense, the most important job in training is teaching your dog English as a Second Language, so we can clearly tell them how we’d like them to act. Yes, you can talk to your dog. And yes, they can learn to understand what you’re saying.

• Food lures show your dog what we’d like them to do when we say a word or give a hand signal, like Sit or Down.
• Food rewards say “thank you” when they get it right.

Food is just the start. As the challenge goes on, you’ll learn to praise as if you mean it, and to use even more powerful Life Rewards: “Let’s go” (the walk continues), “Go sniff,” “Go play,” and games like fetch, tug, and hide and seek.