so our plan is to put homer on a raw diet sometime in the next couple of months. his big sister maxine already eats raw. one of the things that is putting me off is the speed at which homer eats. i am seriously afraid that he will choke on real food. maxine is completely different, she savors every chicken back for a long long time. chews every mouthful. homer, on the other paw, INHALES his dogfood. if i go near him while he is eating he inhales twice as fast. and if it is something especially tasty he hardly seems to chew at all.

is there any way to get him to slow down. i know i'll probably be advised to grind his food before he gets it, but i wish that there was some way to avoid that. i havent spoken to our butcher about grinding yet. the butcher does sell organic chicken backs in convienient one pound bags for a great price, but i dont know about grinding with bone included. i bet they'd do it for me, but it is so easy to jsut grab a couple of bags of backs, pay, and walk out. dont get me wrong, if i have to have the chicken ground i will but it would be easier to not do this.

so, does anyone have any advice on slowing my boy down. i dont know why he is in such a rush, he gets plenty to eat!

I don't know if this will help since I don't feed raw... but we used to put a toy or a ball in Fletch's bowl to slow him down. He is now our slowest eater. This might work if you chop up the raw food into small pieces.

I think he'll slow down. The consistency of the food will be different, so I doubt he'll be able to gulp it down as fast, anyway. I guess, the bigger the pieces, the slower he'll have to go. How was Maxine before you switched her?

Java still eats fairly fast, but she has slowed down from when we first started... she slurped down a whole piece of chicken one of the first times and I watched her very closely... but she definitely chews/tears it apart now.

i know i'll probably be advised to grind his food before he gets it, but i wish that there was some way to avoid that.

That would be my suggestion, grind it up. When Zoe gets her turkey necks she eats them quite fast, I stand right by her telling her to "slow down". She does crunch them up quite well, but the vet said if she eats them with a 'crunch and glup', then take a meat tenderizer and hammer the necks into mush.

Has Homer ever had raw meat before?

LabTested- you mean so that he has to eat around a ball? I might just try that.

CDuncan- maxine was always pretty indifferent towards her kibble. she would eat it, but definately not with the enjoyment that she shows when she eats now. she has never been a fast eater, i wish homer would take a page from her book. we did have some problems withher getting a little growley over her food when we started raw though. that has passed.

Black as Night- Homer has had tastes of raw meat. i usually give him the heart when i cook a chicken for us, and he gets raw marrow bones to chew. a hammering you say? that might be easier for me than having it ground.

Yup, it slows them down when they have to eat smaller amounts around the ball/toy. We used to do this with Scout until he figured out he could just take the ball out! Fletcher never took it out on his own, we just stopped putting it in there since he learned to eat slower. Good luck!

Might be worth a try to give him a raw chicken or turkey neck to see how well he crunches them? This might give you an indication on how he will chew chicken backs, etc. Also, adding water to the mix make them have to slurp it up rather than gulp it.