Feeding a Fussy Eater

Fussy eating is one of the most exasperating things to live with, partly because the advice tends to arrive in two unhelpful flavours: starve them out, or find something they like.

The useful first step is separating two quite different situations. An animal that has always been picky is usually a behaviour problem, and a fixable one. An animal that used to eat well and has recently stopped is a medical question, and the fussiness framing will send you in the wrong direction entirely.

Start here: is this new?

A recent change in appetite in an animal that previously ate normally deserves a vet visit before anything on this page is tried. The most common medical reasons are:

• Dental pain. Very common and very easily missed. A dog with a painful mouth eats slowly, drops food, chews on one side, or will take soft food and refuse dry. Owners read that as developing a preference
• Nausea, from kidney disease, liver disease, or anything affecting the gut. A nauseous animal approaches food, sniffs, and turns away, which looks exactly like fussiness and is not
• Pain elsewhere, particularly neck or joint pain that makes reaching down to a floor-level bowl uncomfortable
• Fever or infection
• Medication, since several common drugs suppress appetite or cause nausea
• Something more serious, in older animals especially, where appetite loss is often the first thing owners notice

The pattern worth reporting is an animal that shows interest in food, goes to the bowl, and then declines. That is nausea or pain far more often than preference, and it is a much more useful thing to describe to a vet than "he has gone fussy".

Cats are a special case, and this part is important

Never attempt to starve a cat into eating. Not for a day, not to make a point.

A cat that stops eating begins mobilising body fat faster than its liver can process it, and the result is a serious liver condition that can develop within a few days and becomes an illness in its own right, entirely separate from whatever caused the cat to stop eating. Overweight cats are at higher risk, not lower.

So with cats the goal is always to get something in, then work out what is going on. A cat that has eaten nothing for 24 hours needs a vet rather than a firmer approach.

How fussiness gets built

Nobody sets out to create a fussy dog. The sequence is remarkably consistent, and every step in it is kind.

1. The dog leaves its dinner
2. The owner worries, quite reasonably, and offers something more appealing
3. The dog eats the better thing
4. The dog, being neither stupid nor stubborn, learns that declining dinner produces chicken
5. The threshold rises, and within a few weeks the dog is holding out for the upgrade every night

The dog is not being difficult. It has correctly identified how the system works. Which also means the system can be changed.

Fixing it, once medical causes are excluded

1. Set meal times and pick the bowl up. Offer food for fifteen or twenty minutes, then remove it until the next meal. Free-choice grazing all day is the most reliable way to make a dog indifferent to food
2. Stop the upgrade. This is the whole thing, and it is the hard part. No toppers, no substitutions, nothing better arriving later because the dinner was refused
3. Count everything else going in. Treats, table scraps, the crust from a child's plate, what the security man gives it. A dog that is quietly getting a third of its calories elsewhere is not fussy, it is full. In multi-person households this is very often the entire explanation
4. Check the portion is right. Bag guidance is generous for many dogs, and a dog offered more than it needs will look like it is leaving food because it is
5. Make it more interesting without making it richer. A little warm water on dry food releases the smell and works well, particularly for older animals whose sense of smell has faded
6. Feed after exercise, not before, and leave a gap either side in large deep-chested breeds
7. Feed somewhere calm. Competition, traffic through the room, or a bowl next to a noisy appliance puts a lot of animals off entirely
8. Change food slowly if you change it at all. Over a week, mixing increasing amounts in. Repeatedly switching foods to find one the dog likes is how fussiness becomes permanent

A healthy adult dog will not harm itself by eating less for a day or two while this resets. A cat, a puppy, an elderly animal or anything with a chronic illness is a different matter, and none of them should be left to hold out.

Cats: the practical points

• Warm the food gently. Cats choose largely by smell, and food at body temperature is far more appealing than food from the fridge
• Wide, shallow dishes. A deep bowl that presses on the whiskers puts many cats off, and this is a genuinely common and easily fixed problem
• Move the bowl away from the water and the litter tray. Cats do not like eating next to either
• Small amounts, more often, and take away anything that has been sitting out. Cats reject food that has gone stale far more readily than dogs
• One cat, one place. In multi-cat homes the quiet cat frequently eats less because it is being crowded, not because it is fussy
• Do not offer six options at once. Cats can develop an aversion to food eaten while feeling unwell, so parading everything in the cupboard during an illness can leave you with fewer options later, not more

Puppies and kittens

A young animal that refuses a meal is not a fussiness problem. They have very little reserve, their blood sugar drops quickly, and a puppy that has not eaten and is quiet or wobbly needs seeing the same day. Worms are a common and easily treated cause of poor appetite in the young.

When there is a medical reason to be fussy

Some animals genuinely need a prescription diet, for kidney disease, urinary problems, allergies or gut disease, and refusing it is a real problem rather than a battle of wills. Transition over two or three weeks, try more than one texture, and tell your vet if it is not working. There are usually alternatives, and abandoning the diet quietly is worse than saying it has failed.

Our free feeding and portion guide gives you the daily amount to work from, which is the number most of this depends on.

Fussiness rarely produces a bill by itself. What it produces is a delay, because the dental pain, the nausea or the early kidney disease sitting underneath a "fussy" animal goes unexamined for months while the household tries a different brand. The consultation that would have found it costs a fraction of what treating it later does.

Consultations and dental treatment at any vet clinic in Nigeria are covered on Skeepy Pet HMO plans, which makes it straightforward to have a look inside the mouth before concluding an animal has simply become particular.