Sims Keep Stealing my Dog's Food!

[Sagana]

Feed them treats. Keeps their hunger up enough they won't get taken away or refuse to learn while you're training them. And doesn't mess with the training.

[Zazazu]

I don't bother to train them to eat any specific thing. They seem happy enough to eat without being encouraged one way or another.

Generally, this is true. It's only when you make the pets contribute and get a job that eating is a problem. Often they come home exhausted and hungry, and choose to sleep while I get messages about them starving to death. You wake them up, and instead of eating, they go back to sleep. Doing a Command - - Eat is necessary then.

[Strangel]

My solution was to make a small, fenced section of the yard, lock the gate as Household Only and then drop the dog's plates in there. That way, guests leave him alone and if I see a member of the house wandering out that way I can refuse them and direct them back to the serving platter.
I wonder if you could set the gate to Allow Me Only via the dog with selectable pets? Will have to test that one..

[MyPrecious]

You obviously haven't played those infernal Crittur dogs. If it weren't for 'controlPets on' (or whatever that cheat-code is), the damn things would have starved. I did have my sims train them toward petfood, but it took a LONG time, and until the training-bar goes from red to green, any pet will refuse a particular activity.

Thank you I had no idea that code exsisted! saved...

[Magicmoon]

I'm back to the junkyard dogs house in my cycle. I was hoping Pes would implement the dropping plate thing in the meantime, but since he hasn't, I tried other ways to cope with these dogs.

I guess I didn't think about it before because I usually don't run restaurants, but I decided to make many single plates so they would go into the inventory and I could just drop them from there. I had been having Sims go to the fridge to retrieve leftovers whenever dogs were hungry and Sims weren't. 

But when I dropped these on the floor for the dogs, they never touched them. I realized this when I got the 'dogs are starving' message. I have 'control pets on' so I selected the dogs and none of them could eat from any of those plates. But if I had a Sim make a single plate which is placed on the counter instead of in the inventory, I was able to make the dogs eat from it.

Maxis really didn't think this one through.