My wife and I adopted our dog 4 and a half years ago. He's an American Stafford shire who will turn 8 years old this April. He's always been a bit of a picky eater and we made the mistake of catering to it for a long time, which has now evolved to a very problematic behavior.
When we first got him, he was slightly underweight, and wasn't a huge fan of kibble. We were told by the vet that he needed to gain some weight preferably, so we started thinking of fun meals to give him. Kibble with plain boiled chicken breast, kibble with some (dog specific) salmon oil, kibble with dried meat sticks from the pet store, and so on. He's always eaten it fine, but after introducing something new to him, he'll enjoy it for a bit and then get bored at one point where he will outright refuse to eat it again.
We've now essentially run out of all options that are within our price range. We've bought over 8 different kibble brands and flavors, but he just refuses it all outright. He was on pain meds for a while for pains, which he now no longer takes since he no longer exhibits any signs of pain.
Starting this week, he's outright refusing food. Since he needed his meds, my wife decided to hand feed him his dinner, and he was a big fan. This is obviously bad since we can't constantly get him to slobber all his food out of our hand (time consuming and kinda gross lmao). This will probably also get boring eventually anyway and then we're truly screwed. I'd love some advice from people who have gone through this and managed to revert the behavior we taught him (we know it's more than likely our own fault).
He still accepts and joyfully eats a meatstick here and there as a treat, so I don't think he has tooth pain, and he gets the zoomies regularly still so I don't think he's in any pain. We've gone through the classics of pumpkin related products, wet foods, toppers, tried slowfeeders, all of which he no longer accepts as "good enough".
We'd love some help, thank you in advance.
submitted by /u/Ok_Seesaw_6002
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