Shiny Dog Bowls

As you all know by now, Misha is a bit "off". She has so many quirks. That's why we love her, I guess.

I have metal dog bowls in a little stand. She does not like when her bowls are clean. When they are clean they are shiny. The water reflects light off the bowl. For some reason this unnerves Misha.

I remember the first time I noticed this behavior. She was about 6 months old. I bought her new bowls. She approached them warily. She would try to drink the water, but each time she did, the reflection of the movement would startle her and she'd run off. It took about 3 hours before she was comfortable with the new bowls.

I thought it had something to do with the new bowl smell. They were different, right? Wrong! Every time I have cleaned her bowls since then she goes through a short period of adaptation. The water moving in the bright, shiny bowls spooks her. She does eventually get over it. It takes about an hour now.

Does anyone elses dog have this problem?

 

I never though of that! I know the dogs dont like glass bowls, they act like they are possessed or magical. They wont touch water in them. Dogs are such funny quirky things!

 

Fortunately my Homer doesn't have any problems with clean bows.I think he even prefers them cleaner, because he has two of them and he always drinks more from the first one which is standing in the room. He almost doesn't use the second one in the corridor, because it is always quite dusty. Maybe you could buy a bow made from a non shiny material? I'm not sure if there are bows like that though.

 

Nikki, I hadn't heard that about glass bowls. It makes sense given my dog's reaction to shiny bowls.

Claudine, I am thinking about looking for something else. She's had these bowls for 3 years and I noticed when I wiping them a little bit of the silver was wiping off. I think they must be wearing down.

Watch. I'll change her bowls and then she won't like them because they aren't the old shiny bowls. LOL

 

Mishka never seem perturbed by how shiny her feed bowl is. Maybe I don't clean it often enough.
If the chrome is flaking off it may be a good time to replace them.Can you use a large china dish instead. I would be a bit concerned of metal substances as they may have contamination of chrome cadmium and other toxic substances.

 

I never really thought about it before, but my dogs also have a preference with their food and water. Neither don't like glass or metal bowls for their food or water. I remember once getting glass cute bowls from them and they wouldn't eat regularly, just usually when they were extremely hungry or thirsty. I bought simple plastic bowls painted their names on them and things went back to normal.

 

Maybe she is seeing her reflection in the bottom of the bowl or something and it's spooking her.

 

Awww, poor thing!

We have only ever had plastic or ceramic/glass ones. I've never had the metal ones. The only time we have had a metal one at all was as a food bowl when we got our current dog....but his owner would put paper bowls in it so she could just replace the bowl every time she fed him instead of cleaning the bowls. So that means he would never actually see the bottom of the bowl anyway.

 

Awwww

 

Our dishes are made of metal, one for drinking water and another for food. All our 3 dogs have their own set. But we do not notice that behavior of being choosy with the metal dish bowl. Maybe your dog is just observant and she learned that habit of staring at the image on the shiny dish bowl. There was one time that Barbie, our youngest dog at 4 years old, had accidentally saw her image in the glass pane of the jalousy window in our dining room. She kept on barking at the window and we were confused until we realized that she was barking at her own image.