On the 29 March 2007 we found our rottweiler Leroy in our laundry and his stomach was bloated to triple it's normal size, he was frothing at the mouth and could hardly breath.  We phoned our local vet – The Ark Animal Hospital in Palmerston, Darwin NT. 

Once we arrived at the vet we were told that he had a bowel obstruction, meaning his stomach had flipped over and he was unable to have bowel movements. This is known as Bloat, Torsion or GDV – Gastric dilatation-volvulus.

From there Leroy endured a 6 hour surgery to rectify this. He spent about 5 days in hospital.  He was ok for a while, but kept on eating his dinner too fast.  Then it happened again. He went back to the vet on 15 May 2007 and had the same procedure again. We have been told it is possible to happen again once a dog has already suffered from it.

We asked our vet what do we need to do to stop this? He advised that we need to slow Leroy’s eating down as he is sucking in too much air when he eats. No vet shops or pet stores had any ideas on how to do this, except for putting rocks or tennis balls in his bowl, hand feeding him or scattering the food on the ground so he has to go and lick it up.  All these answers were time consuming and messy.

We went to our local hardware store and purchased PVC pipe and caps and found a plastic cake dish to glue them to. After many designs and attempts to make something sustainable, that did not break all the time, we eventually came up with what we called the SCOFF STOPPER ® , as we use to yell “stop scoffing your food Leroy!”

A friend who was a vet nurse came around one day and could not believe what we had made and said we should do something to get them made properly and sell them.  She was amazed at how well it worked on Leroy.  From this we went to Patent Lawyers, had drawings done and got the bowl made.

Our hope is to help all the dog owners out there with the problem we had, to slow their dogs eating down to prevent this horrible condition.

The SCOFF STOPPER® is not a cure it’s a preventative.