Why Does My Husky Hide Food: One KEY Reason

If you’ve noticed your husky stashing or burying their food, don’t worry, you’re not the only one!

This is a pretty typical husky trait and many owners, like you, are curious about the reason behind it.

This article explains everything you should know and discusses whether it’s necessary to correct this behavior or let it slide…

Why Your Husky Hides or Buries Food

Hiding or burying food is a classic instinctual behavior many huskies engage in.

Dogs in the wild often hide and bury their food so they have something to eat in the future.

But could there be any other reasons? In some cases, yes.

Another possible reason could be down to anxiety.

It has been seen before that an anxious dog may remove his food from the bowl, hide it somewhere else, or even take it somewhere else before eating.

This could be down to not feeling safe or comfortable eating where the food bowl is located.

One other reason, although rarer, could be down to possessiveness. A good indication would be if your husky displays possessive behavior at other times, with toys, treats, or even you!

Could it be that he just doesn’t like the food?

You may be inclined to think your husky hides his food because he doesn’t like it or want to eat it. While this makes sense to us, our canine friends are not that intelligent.

Ironically enough, hiding food for later indicates that he does actually want to eat it. If your husky doesn’t like his food, he’ll just leave it

To sum it up: Huskies may hide their food for the following reasons:

• It’s an instinctual behavior ingrained into him (ensuring a future meal)
• Your husky is anxious (in the moment, or in general)
• The food bowl is in a location your husky doesn’t feel comfortable with
• Your husky is displaying possessive behavior

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Instinctual Behaviors are Strong

Of course, we know that your husky is going to receive another meal, at the same time you feed him every day! So this probably leaves you wondering why he does it in the first place?

Well, instinctual behavior is ingrained into dogs, even more so huskies. It goes all the way back to life in the wild where survival was the main priority.

Food would have been scarce, and hiding food for later would ensure a future meal.

You may see other common instinctual behaviors from your husky on a daily basis, this includes, howling in response to sirens or witnessing his urge to chase a bird or your neighbor’s cat.

It’s all about survival, and from one of the world’s oldest dog breeds, the Siberian husky has strong instincts. One thing to know about instinctual behaviors is that they are very difficult to stop or train against.

Is It a Problem If Your Husky Hides Food?

It’s not always an issue, so long as your husky does shortly eat his food afterward and this behavior isn’t coupled with any aggression.

But it’s also understandable if you want to stop the food-hiding altogether. After all, it can get quite frustrating when every mealtime creates such a mess.

One of the most important things to ensure is that your husky is eating his full meals and receiving the correct amount of calories. If hiding food disrupts his diet, you must intervene.

Reasons you may want to stop your husky hiding food:

• Your husky doesn’t end up eating his food
• The behavior is coupled with possessiveness/aggression
• It’s creating a lot of mess in your house

In the next section, I’ll cover how you can encourage your husky to eat his meals when he’s supposed to.

Helpful Article: How much should you feed a husky puppy?

How To Stop Your Husky Hiding Food

Instincts are difficult to stop, so it’s wiser to approach the issue from a different angle.

You’ll notice the following tips aren’t about training him to not bury food… I’m not sure what that training would look like anyway!

It’s about making eating the food a priority over burying it. And making your husky want to eat his food when you give it to him.

1. Time-restricted eating

After putting down the food bowl, give your husky about 5-10 minutes and then remove the bowl altogether (eaten or not). After a few times of doing this, your husky will soon learn the importance of eating his full meal as soon as you put the food down. Hiding it will no longer be the priority, eating it will.

This of course won’t work too well if your husky immediately begins hiding his food. So a different approach will be needed.

2. Limit treats or any excess food

If you’re currently giving your husky treats throughout the day or excess scraps, try stopping that. These extra treats and scraps, even though small, could still disrupt his appetite. Huskies do not have a great appetite anyway due to their extremely efficient metabolism.

Cutting these extra calories out may help your husky feel hungry enough to eat his food when he’s given it.

3. Increase his excess

Yep, this wouldn’t be a true husky article if I didn’t mention exercise. Huskies are athletes and need to be worked physically and mentally much more than other breeds.

If your current exercise routine isn’t enough, your husky may not have a big enough appetite to want to eat his food when given to him, which will resort to him burying it for later.

4. Adjust his mealtimes

While it’s very important to stick to the same meal times every day, have a think about your current times. Maybe the time in the morning or evening that you are currently sticking to, isn’t the most appropriate.

This will be different for every household depending on your routine so it’s hard for me to say. But you could try changing his mealtimes. Just do this with caution and remember to not always change his mealtimes. Make an adjustment, and then stick to it for a while to see if your situation improves.

5. Use wet food in with his kibble

This is starting to sound more and more like a diet article! But never the less if you aren’t already doing this I strongly recommend making 20% of the majority of his mealtimes wet food. This is actually what veterinarians recommend across the board, 80% of the bowl dry kibble, 20% wet dog food.

You get a range of nutritional benefits from doing this, but what we are interested in here is how much more appealing it makes the food. Having some juicy, tasty wet food with gravy mixed in with the kibble, will encourage your husky to just eat it, instead of saving it for later. He won’t be able to resist the incredibly tasty wet food.

One Important Thing to Remember

Most of the time, hiding food will be down to instincts and isn’t particularly anything to worry about.

However, we always recommend keeping a close eye on any additional behaviors…

If you notice that your husky has just started hiding food, and this is mixed with some other unusual behavior that you haven’t seen before, it may indicate something is wrong.

What that is specifically is hard to tell, but it could be down to anxiety, possessiveness, or perhaps some underlying health issues.

If you realize the food-hiding has suddenly come out of nowhere and it’s coupled with other unusual behaviors, it wouldn’t hurt to schedule an appointment with your veterinarian just to be on the safe side.

Summary

So there you have it, you now have a better understanding of why your husky hides his food, and what you can do about it, even if you don’t want to do anything about it!

If you have experienced this with your husky drop a comment below on how you dealt with it. It may just help out another husky owner!

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