A few months I am pretty sure I mentioned something about Ayla deciding she was only going to eat once a day from now on. I kinda feel like it had something to do with her going into heat but apparently I either worded it very strangely or just didn’t tag it well for the future because I can’t seem to find the post anymore. When she was a puppy she was eating three meals a day. Then ,around the time we went to Italy which also happened to be her 6-7 month age range, she cut herself down to just two a day – completely ignoring the lunch meal and only picking at it. Then she suddenly decided breakfast was coming too early in the morning and wouldn’t eat it anymore. This could have had something to do with her just losing interest in the food she was eating as well but we’ve fixed that problem with new dog food and I mix a bit of canned food in with the kibble as well to make it more appetizing. Everything has been going fine with the once a day eating and she usually didn’t even seem to get really hungry until it was dinner time.
But now, things have changed and I’m thinking maybe the once a day thing had to do with a growth spurt. She was sleeping a lot during the day and not really getting as energetic as usual in the afternoon. With all the chaos going on around us all the time, I thought the constant car rides and everything else were just wearing her out. Today, on the other hand, she has been driving me rather crazy for the past 3 hours. Some of it was just her wanting me to go play with her outside but then at about 4, she seemed to be wanting to actually eat. She was looking at her food bowl and whimpering, coming into the office and whining at me and just begging for attention in general which is usually not very like her. We’ve had lots of small behavior changes since she was in heat but today was really a first and I’ve noticed that it’s really gotten more noticeable the last few days.
So I think I will try feeding her twice a day again. Since she’s been wanting to go on walks between 7:30-8:30 am during the week, I think I will try feeding her after the walk just since she doesn’t seem hungry before and usually snoozes in the entry way until she realizes she really needs to go “hurry up.” And then we’ll do the usual evening feeding and hopefully all will go well. I’ve been thinking about doing this anyway the last few days because we feed her dry kibble with the hint of canned food one day and veggie flakes with canned food the next day – and after the flakes & canned combo, her stool is a bit runny (sorry again to all the people who don’t care to be reading about this lol). And of course on the dry days, it’s firm as can be…so mixing it up so she’s eating both on the same day should help to regulate her as well I would think.
