#I'm pretty sure I've seen my irl dog eat actual dirt sometimes

[pushing500]

Hi Gracie, I'm hoping you might have some advice for me. My colonists are starving, because I have more people than I know how to feed. Is there any way I can tell them to stop feeding their meals to the animals?

They keep cooking meals, feeding the meals to the animals, and then eating raw meat and being sad about it!

It's mostly the dogs they're feeding the meals to, too, because the haygrass finally grew enough for the pen animals. And dogs can eat raw meat just fine, so it would make way more sense to feed the dogs the meat instead.

(I am trying to solve the underlying problem by 1. assigning more people to plants so they will sow the fields my current farmers are apparently neglecting, and 2. increasing the population cap of my animals so that they produce more excess, but both these things take time and in the meantime they are constantly running out of food and I'm hunting pretty much every wild animal that wanders onto the map to keep my colonists alive.)

Hello! I have this issue a lot, too. Those silly colonists want to prioritise their beloved animals over their own comfort, which is sweet, but very airheaded of them.

I can usually stop animals from eating meals on their own by simply changing their allowed areas to prevent them from accessing the fancy "people food", but it gets trickier when tending to injured animals or training them.

I have found a mod called 'Animal Controls' on the Steam Workshop which says it adds animal food restrictions, however, I haven't had a chance to test it out myself yet so I'm afraid I can't vouch for its effectiveness. Perhaps I'll test it out in my next RimWorld game!