What am I not doing?

[Sowa]

I'll just keep doing things my way and keep it to myself or ask Clovers obedience trainer when she starts. I tend to take things from forums personally lol.

Just so you know though, I do not do this every meal. I don't even do it that often. As for the hand feeding I only fed her a few mouth fulls and let her be.

I just know these things can escalate. And I'm not going to have her bite my young niece or nephew some day they are over and pat her without thinking and have her bite them. I'm not saying she would do that, she's a sweet dog. I just would rather her know she doesn't need to growl.

I guess I felt even when I tried to take someones suggestion, I still get shot down saying "You're doing it wrong!" Which makes me feel bad, because I'm trying to do everything I can for her.

[K9soul]

I wasn't trying to imply you were doing things wrong. Just throwing out there what I personally would try to do. I'm sorry if you are offended. Sometimes it takes some trial and error, because every dog is different.

[Sowa]

I wasn't referring to you or any one person. Sorry if it seemed that way.

[K9soul]

I can empathize in how it would be uncomfortable to have people scrutinizing what you are or aren't doing, what you should or shouldn't do. That's a reason I like to read articles and books a lot. They aren't personally looking at me and saying "Ah! that's not the way!" . I have no doubts that you're a very caring dog mom.

[wolf_Q]

When all of my dogs were puppies I put my hand in their bowl every so often to get them used to me being around them with food...fed them from my hand...never dealt with the growling issue but I can say none of my dogs are food aggressive with people at all. They can be brats about sharing with other dogs though. I could take a steak out of their mouths and they would be okay with it. One thing I did that may help is a lot of times when I put my hand in their food dish I'd be adding a treat to their dish too. So me putting my hand in their food was often a positive thing for them. You may have said you already tried that I didn't read all of the responses so sorry if somebody mentioned that already.

[MonicanHonda]

Feeding from your hand isn't bad. I know many many people, and I would do the same if I fed kibble, that make the dogs work for every piece of their kibble. Throughout the day, using their kibble as treats in small training sessions. Or feeding half the allotted amount and using the other half for training sessions.

Don't worry, there are lots of ways to deal with things and someone will always find something wrong. But then that means someone will always find what you're doing right. :-D Lol