Family-style Dining

I’ve had dogs in my life since childhood. Though we have our first cat now, we consider ourselves “dog people” by natural selection. Our current canine family member is an English Mastiff named Oden. He’s almost 3 years old and weighs in at about 200 lbs. He is unlike any dog we’ve had before in so many ways, but this post will focus on one specific behavior that separates him from the rest.

Oden is a “free feeder”, meaning that we place his food in his bowl and sometimes he eats it then, but more often he gets around to eating it eventually. There are days that he will eat his two bowls at breakfast and dinner times and other days he’ll eat them back to back in the middle of the afternoon. I used to worry that it was an odd behavior because it is so different than all the dogs I’ve had before. His attitude towards food is very much like his attitude in general, which is to say he’s the most easygoing member of the house by orders of magnitude.

What I’ve realized in the past few months is that it isn’t as random a schedule as I’d thought originally. Our life as a large household with many children and many activities they’re involved in is probably the definition of chaos to outsiders. We prepare and eat dinner at varying times depending on the day of the week. At first I thought it may be coincidence, but after paying close attention and mentally logging the data (as I tend to do), I can say with certainty that the behavior is intentional.

Oden eats with us.

He knows he isn’t permitted beyond the boundaries of the kitchen cabinets and adheres to this “invisible forcefield” very consistently. When we start to prepare our meals, he pays attention to what’s going on, but almost in the background; merely an observer. Once members of the family start to sit around the kitchen counter seating and the table in our “nook” next to his custom-built-to-his-size dog crate (more on that in another post), he engages. He looks at all of us eating and then walks over to his bowl and begins to eat his food. I appreciate this act of family every single time he does it.

This may be something that is common to his breed, or to dogs more generally, but it isn’t anything we’ve experienced before. He is our first English Mastiff (and possibly our last… the drool stories are real), but if anyone has experiences like this, I’d love to hear about them.

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