YNP #107: Stop Dinnertime Chaos
Your New Puppy: Dog Training and Dog Behavior Lessons to Help You Turn Your New Puppy into a Well-Behaved Dog
Debbie Cilento: Dog Trainer | Dog Behavior Consultant | Owner of Playtime Paws | Belly Rub Specialist
4.8 • 917 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dinner should be a chance to relax, not a nightly negotiation with your dog.
In this episode of Your New Puppies Podcast, I’m breaking down one of the most common struggles I see with puppies and adult dogs: dogs begging, barking, or demanding attention while their humans are trying to eat.
It does make sense that this happens. Besides the obvious food, everyone is gathered together, and there tends to be a lot of movement and chaos. Your dog just wants in.
The good news is you don’t need to teach new cues, run training drills, or micromanage every meal to fix this. This is a perfect example of how we can train without training by using consistency, structure, and a predictable routine.
In this episode, I talk about:
- Why dinner time is such a challenging moment for dogs
- Why attention (even negative attention) keeps the behavior going
- How to give your dog something better to do before begging starts
- When and how to remove access to the table altogether
- How to build a predictable dinner routine
These are things you can start doing today. It may not be perfect immediately, but with consistency, most families see improvement within a week.
Enjoying this podcast? Please rate and review it wherever you listen. This helps other puppy parents find it.
Other resources mentioned and related to this episode:
Your New Puppy’s Podcast: YNP #018: Ditch the Bowl and Make Mealtime an Event
Your New Puppy’s Podcast: YNP #025: Is Human Food Good for Dogs?
Your New Puppy’s Podcast: YNP #084: My Favorite DIY Puzzle Feeders
YOUR Perfect Puppy: If you’re looking for ongoing guidance with situations like this, this episode is also a great example of the kind of real-life problem-solving we do inside YOUR Perfect Puppy, where I help you turn everyday chaos into manageable routines that work for your household.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to your new puppies podcast, starting you and your dog off on the right paw. |
| 0:16.3 | Here's your host, Debbie Salento. |
| 0:36.3 | Hello and welcome to episode 107 of your new puppies podcast. I'm Debbie, and today we're going to talk about a super common struggle, whether you have a puppy or a full-grown dog. |
| 0:43.4 | And that is when they interrupt meal time. So not their meal time, your dog's meal time, your meal time. So whenever the humans of the household, whether it's just you |
| 0:55.4 | or you and, you know, the whole family with kids, trying to sit down and eat and your dog is |
| 1:02.8 | begging, barking, maybe pacing, or just attention seeking. And of course, this is totally normal, especially because food is |
| 1:12.5 | involved. It can also be that, especially if you have a whole family gathering together, |
| 1:19.5 | your dog wants to participate. And because dinnertime can sometimes be a little chaotic with, |
| 1:25.6 | you know, finishing cooking, setting the table, you know, |
| 1:29.5 | everybody trying to wrangle everybody to sit down, having your dog underfoot getting exciting, |
| 1:34.7 | excited with all of this chaos and movement, just adding to it. So what we're going to talk |
| 1:40.8 | about here is, you know, preventing it from happening altogether, |
| 1:45.2 | which you know is my favorite thing to do. And also, if it's already happening, we're going to |
| 1:51.0 | talk about how to redirect it and possibly manage it. And the good news is these are things that you can |
| 1:56.7 | start doing today. It may not work immediately because we have to develop a new habit, |
| 2:02.6 | but you can start doing it. And this is actually one of my favorite places to talk about how |
| 2:09.7 | you can train without training. So there's no like teaching new cues, running drills, setting up scenarios. The things I'm going to |
| 2:21.1 | talk about today, like those things can help. You know, if it's, if what we talk about today isn't |
| 2:26.5 | working, that's something else you can try. But we're just going to talk about by using consistency, |
| 2:31.5 | a little bit of structure, and creating some patterns, |
| 2:35.1 | aka habits, we can create a peaceful dinner time without having to ask for it. |
| 2:41.8 | Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is that we were never going to feed our dogs |
... |
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