[nutrie]

Dogs aren't exactly wild animals. They've picked up lots of bad habits along the way, due to selective breeding, not having to hunt for food, and whatnot. I used to have a caucasian shepherd, among other dogs we've had in our family, and as she started aging, it had become gradually quite difficult to keep her weight in check. "Forcing" her eat less and more frequently did the trick. She had hip dysplasia, so it was either this or put her to sleep. She got used to it eventually. Some dogs tend to overeat (apparently labradors have a problem here, some boxers too, from top of my head), some don't. Letting them choose may or may not be the right strategy. The owner should be smart and responsible enough to figure it out. But that's a different issue altogether.

[admax88qqq]

All your examples were about dogs overeating, which I don't think anyone would disagree dogs can do. But I think it's pretty rare for dogs to under eat and to need to trick them into eating their food.

[nutrie]

It's not uncommon at all. Take toothache, for example. The catch is they can't tell you, and we are terrible at reading the subtle signs.

[risenshinetech]

Pretty sure a dog will eat through a toothache too, but no one has mentioned anything remotely like this situation. You're bending over backwards to rationalize the really odd behavior of invoking a dead puppy friend to encourage a dog to eat. They will eat when they're hungry.

And in your strange example, if this dog wasn't eating due to a toothache, the parents are forcing the dog to anxiously eat through the pain of a toothache.

[wizzwizz4]

Some dogs can communicate such things. Bunny (of What About Bunny) can vaguely, imprecisely, communicate "some kind of pain somewhere" using a button-activated buzzer system. She can sometimes name the approximate location of the pain after a minute or two of thought. (See https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=RN_ZpyS6Fkc&t=34 )

I have no idea how you'd get "I'm in pain" from the associated body language; but, then again, I'm not a dog. In this case there were behavioural cues, but I don't know how I'd tell if there weren't.

[082349872349872]

The usual way we get pain from horses is because they start to do things differently than they usually do. Not having a normal "walk cycle" (slight pain is easiest to see in trot), scratching bellies more than usual, rolling more than usual, rolling less than usual, eating slower than usual, eating faster than usual, shitting less than usual, shitting more than usual; you get the idea. O11y is not that bad — but you must have a "known good" baseline.

For toothache specifically, we'd do a differential check: does the horse eagerly eat a soft mash, but won't eat hard cubes? If so, time to grab that tongue and do a visual inspection (and if everything looks normal, it's still worth palpating).

(a typical vet complaint is that owners don't do any of the above, and first notice only when stench ultimately makes it obvious to check for toothache)