When you think about your pet and how you feed them, you most likely think about the food, and not the other way around. My dog, who has a very unique way of eating, will often eat the skin off my hand while I am trying to feed the dog with a spoon. So, I think of what my dog eats as feeding him. I feed him with the tip of the spoon and his fur will be on the spoon.
For the dog, I think of it as feeding him. Pet owners tend to think about their pets in quite the opposite way. Pet owners think of their pets so much as food that they often don’t think about the other way around. I think of my dog as feeding me, and thinking of my dog as food is how I feed him.