Some of y’all aren’t training your dogs on food aggression and anxiety and it shows.
Play with your dog’s food while it eats, don’t take it away, but move the bowl around and stick your fingers in the food. Get them used to you fucking with their food, and show them that nothing bad happens when their food gets touched. Especially if you have little kids or have little kids that come to your home with friends and family, your dog should be trained not to get anxious or aggressive about food. I’ve seen a lot of kids get scared by dogs because the dog is very defensive about food, but 5 minutes of training a day will knock that right out of them.
For the record, we do and have done all of those things. This isn't a story about my dog getting aggressive with the cats. If anything, we need to make a point of keeping the cats out of her food bowl because she will let them take her food away, all the while looking at us to please do something. It's just that she seems to sometimes get ambivalent about whether she is in fact hungry or not... but that ambiguity immediately disappears if a cat comes over and sniffs her bowl.
My cat just has to be present in the room. The dog don't give two squirts of piss about that food until the cat is in the room, at which point the food is suddenly at extreme risk.
In the year and some change we've had our dog, the cat has never gone within five feet of the his food bowl.
