Existential Feeding AKA Hand Feeding: Why I Opt For Other Dog Training Methods
- Vivian Maganas
- Apr 2
- 4 min read
Oversimplification is a dangerous thing in dog training.
It makes it easy to sell people on training ideology, sure.
But the problem comes when this stuff trickles down the trainer chain to people who saw a thing about someone doing a thing who learned from someone who actually knows how to do the original thing the original way.
Or who said something that they heard someone say who learned it from someone who is actually doing it at a high level.
The who, what, where, when and why gets lost.
People just say or do it because that's what everyone else is saying or doing.
For example: “Shock collars cause pain.”
Well… yes… they do. But this oversimplification to sell NOT using ecollars excludes the research and proof why owners NEED an ecollar so their dog can be happy and enjoy off leash freedom.
A whole side to it is missed.
And this is the war cry of a million people online who have no idea how to use an ecollar in training…
…and who have possibly not even seen one in person...
...and who have only, at best, trained their own personal dog.
Here’s another one: “Existential (hand) feeding dog training methods are essentially just not feeding a dog out of a bowl.”
In a way, yes…
But there is so much more to it.
Let’s go to a reputable source:
(Because if you want to know the who, what, where, when and why, you don’t go to the trainer around the block or the trainer on YouTube… )
Like a certified NePoPo® instructor…
So here are some phrases to pick out in the first half of the video….
“Here it is, take it or leave it… I’m giving you the opportunity and if you don’t want to take this food that’s totally fine but I’m not giving you this food later on.”
“Under these conditions when I offer you food, you should take it because there is no other food.”
(7:00) “A puppy will get hungry very, very quickly and you can give it this illusion of scarcity very easily”
Notice that word scarcity. Interesting choice.
I will circle back to that later.
But before I get in trouble… let me make this clear…
A good chunk of trainers using existential feeding DO NOT starve their dogs.
They don’t have dogs with ribs and hips sticking out that could be poster children for the SPCA.
But they do withhold dogs’ access to food if the dog is not going to work for it and can create an uncertain schedule around food access and feeding.
And like it was directly said in the video… it gives the “illusion of scarcity.”
And that's the goal.
“Take this now because you don’t know when it will be offered again.”
Now… an easy Google search can reveal the psychological impact that food scarcity has on both people and animals.
Especially in juveniles.
But because the oversimplification “Existential feeding is just not feeding a dog out of a bowl” sounds so innocuous (and the benefits on food drive are very obvious)…
… why Google it?
Humour me and do it.
If you are struggling to find something relevant to dog training, let me nudge you in the right direction…
A 2022 review called “Experimental biology can inform our understanding of food insecurity”
I’ll even pick out the two main “advantageous” features of food scarcity in this review .. They are sort of hard to find among the discussions about weight gain, impacts on learning, depression, detectable neurological differences in adulthood and so on…
1. On motivation to work for food (with the side-effect of hyperactivity) (“Myers et al. (2022) also reported that during the time of the ongoing manipulation, the insecure rats showed hyperactivity and greater motivation to work for palatable food in a progressive ratio test.”).
2. On flexibility in insecure environments ( Lin et al. (2022) postulated that a more uncertain environment gates flexibility in mice with a history of food insecurity and that this might represent a ‘predictive adaptive response’ (PAR). This idea was supported by work in human subjects that found acute priming for uncertainty enhanced flexibility in human subjects who had experienced more uncertain environments in their past (Mittal et al., 2015). In this way, flexibility may be gated such that it emerges in environments that ‘match’ the more uncertain developmental environment. By this same logic, organisms that are adapted for uncertainty may face a ‘mismatch’ between their environment and their phenotypic strategy if the environment becomes more stable when they are developmentally mature and no longer plastic.) Although this was only confirmed with male rats.
You can do the rest of the digging yourself… but I’ll end off with one more excerpt from this review...
“Research in animals shows that the unpredictability or uncertainty inherent in food insecurity may be as influential as scarcity, with separate or at least additive effects on development.“
So yeah… most trainers are not starving their dogs when they use existential feeding aka hand feeding.
But you don’t really even need to get that far for it to start creating problems for your dog.
And if there are other ways to motivate dogs that avoid all that...
...negative stuff...
...wouldn't you just want to do that instead?
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