Finding the best dog bowl can be a huge mess! We’re here to save you time and money by giving you our recommendation on the only one you’ll need for your hungry dog.
Labrador Retrievers are known for being food-obsessed and voracious eaters. They are also known for having health issues associated with a tendency to overeat and be overweight, which is an issue that Lab owners sometimes struggle with.
Labradors tend to LOVE their dog food and welcome the chance to gobble it up, generally as fast as they can. Especially if it’s dry kibble dog food in a bowl.
A traditional bowl allows them to scarf down their food rapidly, without even taking a break!
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This isn’t always a good idea, though. You can run the risk of a condition called bloat, which can be fatal to your dog! Let’s go over what bloat is, and why you want to try to prevent it from happening to your dog.
Why Finding the Best Dog Bowl Matters
Your wonderful, excited, and hungry dog can end up with some major problems if they eat too fast… one of them being the dreaded sickness called bloat.
Bloat can kill your dog! Bloat is a medical emergency that causes blood flow to be reduced or cut off in the digestive area of your dog, and their stomach to eventually flip over. If not rapidly treated by your veterinarian, it’s possible that the blood flow to your dog’s heart could be restricted and the condition could be fatal to your dog.
Even if they don’t end up with bloat, we’ve had a lot of experience with Labradors eating too fast and throwing up.
This will result in your Labrador leaving you a nice little present on the floor not long after they finished their meal!
So that brings us to your best solution: finding the tools to help prevent bloat in your dog and prevent unwanted vomiting after eating.
While there’s no guarantee no matter what bowl you use that your dog won’t ever vomit or get bloat, we found a certain type of dog bowl called a slow-feeder, that seems to slow our Labradors down during mealtimes.
Once we found it, we’ve been thrilled with it, and have never gone back to the old type of bowl.
Using this type of dog bowl can help slow down your dog while eating, will last for years, and be easy to clean. We stick ours in the dishwasher on the top rack.
There are several colors and sizes to choose from depending on how large your dog is. For Labradors, we recommend the larger purple and orange bowls.
It’s a great solution! We’ve had excellent success buying these (with our own money, not at a discount) for our hungry Labradors, and they work really well.
It works by adding a few minutes to the length of time your dog takes to eat their meal, as it creates a bit of extra work they have to do to get the food out (and into their hungry Lab tummies).
We’ll never go back to a regular bowl again! It saved a lot of barfing around here and no cases of bloat have happened, thankfully.
You can read the tens of thousands of reviews on Amazon as well to see it’s a very popular pick.
So check out our go-to favorite bowl from Outward Hound here, and let us know if you like it, and what your dog has to say about it!
Our goal is that this will make your life easier by slowing down your dog’s meals and making one less problem for you in your life! It has definitely been a huge help in our Labrador world.
If you want more tips on daily life and caring for your Labrador, check out our Health & Care section!
