In my day, we didn’t have all these fancy schmancy dog bowls with their non-tip shapes and their fancy stalagmites sticking up out of them. We used plain, tippable, flimsy plastic bowls and we liked it! If your dog ate too fast, too bad!
Seriously though, modern ingenuity never ceases to astound me. What appears on first glance to be a large Duplo is in fact a very cleverly designed bowl designed to reduce the risk of bloat by slowing down a dog’s ingestion of food. Although bloat most commonly strikes large, deep chested dogs with a proclivity for inhaling food and kibble, it can strike any dog, any time. And it’s a killer.
Common sense precautions such as feeding smaller, more frequent meals and avoiding exercise around mealtimes abound, but lots of tricks have evolved over the years to try and slow down the dog who thinks the food is going to disappear into thin air if not eaten in its entirety in 5 seconds or less. I’ve heard of people putting tennis balls or rocks into the bowl to force the dog to eat around them, but for those with indiscriminate eaters the risk is pretty obvious there. This is a nice design that gets around that problem.
I considered getting one for Emmett to try out, but he’s actually a pretty deliberate eater so I never got around to it. I have been mentioning them to clients, though I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback. I’d love to hear from anyone who has used these, and what your experiences have been. What a simple, basic way to reduce a very risky behavior! I think they should make one for people too. I’d use it for pasta.
Just to let you know — your paragraph breaks all come through cleanly in the RSS feed now. However, all your posts show up twice on my google reader feed.
Thank you for letting me know- I’ll sic tech support on that.
I think we have it fixed now- please let me know if it’s still doing that for you!