Do Dogs Prefer Dried Foods Over Their Regular Food?

Humans generally like dry food — to an extent, at least. While drying food was originally done as a method to preserve food for long periods of time, it’s evolved to become a method of preparing food, as dried food delivers a unique taste that you can’t achieve in any other way. Aside from this, some foods are also just naturally dry such as crackers. But do dogs like dry food just as much as we do? Today, let’s find out.

Dogs and Dog Food

While they may not be as picky as cats or some other pet species, dogs can still be a little choosy with their food. Sometimes, they’ll barely touch their food bowls, and other times they may even actively vomit out the food if they don’t like it at all. Unfortunately, you can’t just ask them what food they like or dislike, but pet owners have a general idea of what they prefer.

In general, dogs prefer fresh and regular food over dried food. This is because it’s closer to what they were used to eating back when they were untamed canines. Fresh meat is very easy for them to eat, as their sharp fangs can easily tear through meat and even bones fairly easily. Aside from this, fresh meat has a taste to it that gets lost when it becomes dry.

On the other hand, dog owners often prefer dried food for their dogs over fresh food. Take, for example, freeze-dried dog food. They’re very easy to serve up on a bowl or platter for your pet. You don’t need to cook anything or prepare anything as the meal will be ready to eat from the get-go. You can simply pour it out of the bag and voila — dinner’s served. Not all dogs like dried food, though, and this makes it a challenge to actually feed them such meals.

When Should I Feed Dried Food to My Dog?

Just because your dog doesn’t like dried food doesn’t mean they’ll never eat it. In fact, one reason why they may not want to eat dried food anymore is that they’ve gotten tired of it. As such, the key to serving dried food to your dog is by being creative with how you serve it. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Firstly, you can mix up your dog’s meals to keep them interesting every single time. You can give them fresh food on one meal and then dry food on the next. By spacing out the dry food meals, they’re less likely to get tired or fed up with the food. If you can figure out how much dry food your dog can tolerate, you can use this method to feed them for as long as you’d like.

Alternatively, you can make dry food more appealing by mixing it with fresh food. Yes, this defeats the purpose of actually owning dry food, but if your dog won’t eat the dry food anyway, at least this method won’t put that food to waste. There’s still a chance for the dog to simply eat the fresh parts while leaving the dry food behind, but at that point, there’s probably not much else you can do.