This could be me.
My dog is my kid, and the best part is that I don't have to prepare him for life in the real world like you do with human kids.
I may have told y'all this before, but I feed my dog by hand. With a fork. I do it because I had a dog that nearly choked to death on her meal. Had I not come into the room and found her lying on her side struggling to breathe at
that specific instant, I would have lost her. I grabbed her and stuck my finger down her throat to dislodge the hunk of food. I pulled some out, the rest went on down and she reflexively bit me because nobody likes having a finger shoved down your throat. I got a little infection from the bite -- a very small price to pay for being able to save her from death. I had 2 at the time, so I just put down an old pillowcase to serve as a placemat, sat the girls in front of me on the bed, and fed them by fork. My little one even had second choking incident once after I started doing that, but I was right there and right on it.
Fast forward a few years. After losing both my little ones, I managed to find another little poodle to adopt. His transition from the home where he lived the first 12 years of his life was traumatic for him, and it took me a while to get him to eat regular dog food. Once he "normalized," I could feed him in the "normal" way. It was at that point I noticed that he would devour his food as if he were in an eating competition. That's when I went back to the fork method so he could pace his eating and never choke. And I'm not going to lie. I do enjoy feeding my dogs in this manner. It's a bonding experience, and I don't ever have to give it up. So toy poodles have replaced those babies that I never got to have.
P.S. If I were to own larger dogs, I can't see this ever happening. I wouldn't be afraid of their choking, although it's astonishing how many people share similar scary moments once I tell them about mine.
