A success story!

For years I have been a poorly trained dog owner and allowed my 2 dogs to
torment me as I fed them.

They would whine, dance around me, get underfoot and jump at the food bowls
while I placed them into the feeding station.

Inspired by a popular dog training TV show, I decided to become more proactive.

What I did was train myself to have the dogs lie quietly on their bed while I
prepared the food and put the bowls into their feeding stations (it's an

FurPaw...

Good for you! You trained them to make responses that are
incompatible with their annoying behaviors.

Our yellow lab, Oppie, was a terror at dinner time when he was a
pup - he'd whip himself into a jumping, whining and barking
frenzy. So we trained him that to get food, he had to lie down
with his head on the ground. He does so in his own inimitable
way - he rears back on his haunches, salaams a couple of times,
belly flops, and after the food goes down, he sticks his butt up
in the air and then lifts his forequarters, thereby treating us
to 10 years of good laughs when we feed him. (ok, so we allowed
a little superstitious behavior to creep in).

With Gordo, we did something quite different. Gordo was a
chihuahua, and a true omega if I ever saw one. At dinner time
he'd cringe and hunker down - you'd think the poor little guy had
been beaten - and he had to be enticed to the food bowl to eat.
I couldn't stand this, either, so we trained him that he had to
beg in order to get the food - sitting on haunches is
incompatible with cringing. It took about a month, but we got
him to stop the cringing.

attractive raised wooden box that I built so the big dogs wouldn't have to
stretch their necks to the ground while they ate).

Although my training took about a week to complete, the dogs now know that if
they want to eat they must quietly lie down on their bed and wait until I
give a distinctive verbal command.

Dinnertime is now so peaceful.