After years in the Navy, it took me some time to recognize that I could leisurely eat and enjoy a meal, instead of the short period I often had to inhale something and get back to my duty station. As a child, I was taught to eat with several formalities, table manners, that seemed ridiculous then. And learning to eat slowly. These made it more pleasant to eat with “polite company”. Dogs do not hold to such pretense.
Kane, at four years old, is not possessed of many bad habits I . His first week in our home has seen his table-height sniffer recognize some tasty bits. The first day he found a snack my son left unwatched for a minute. A day or so later, I had left a Kong stuffed with kibble and peanut butter unobserved as I prepared to go out to work. A few minutes and the Kong was on the living room floor. After a few more days, Kane is recognizing his boundaries in that regard. But his normal eating habits are not too different than having a toddler, or a Bootcamp recruit, in the house.
It has been at least several years since dog food has been scattered in a wide arc or water lays splashed in small puddles in our kitchen. Keeping the floor tidy by his bowls is a practice that the family has jumped in to help in these first weeks. Rapid gulping down food, which then resulted in him vomiting it back up later, was a condition that large dogs such as mastiffs are prone to experience. But I resolved this much easier than the second day, doling out small portions of kibble over an hour at mealtime.
At the vet for his initial checkup post-adoption, the veterinary technician, told me about a dish she uses to remedy the same issues with her dog. She uses a bowl with ridges that prevents the dog from inhaling his kibble, but takes several minutes of patient eating. To avoid Kane eating to rapidly and then throwing it back up, I bought a bowl available on Amazon.
So Kane now has an extra large purple bowl that looks like a corn maze reproduced in ceramic.
It's a Dog's Life 