My friend Kyle emailed me today with the subject line “oh yeah, here’s a brilliant invention” — maybe just a touch of sarcasm there? He’d found the Brake-Fast dog food bowl on a website that lists weird new products, I guess, and thought it was hilarious.

But Kyle’s never owned a dog.

And if you’re a dog owner, and especially the owner of a large or giant breed with a deep narrow chest, — like Great Danes or Dobermans or Greyhounds or German Shepherds, etc. — you’ll know that a greedy big dog can be at real risk of Gastric Dilatation-Volvulus (GDV) or Bloat that can be fatal to your dog.

Well, this Brake-Fast dog food bowl is designed to help prevent that dangerous risk of bloat, by slowing down the speed at which your gobbling chow-hound can hoover up his dinner — he’s got to work around those built-in obstructions to get at his food.

It makes good sense — For years now, many knowledgeable dog-owners have been putting a couple of hefty rocks in their dog’s food bowls, or a length of heavy chain, to accomplish the same purpose. But that’s inconvenient and unattractive, and very very loud when Fido goes banging his dish about to clean up the last few morsels of dinner… unlike this pretty blue bowl.

As I told Kyle — far from being a joke-product to chuckle over in inter-office emails, I actually think this is a very sensible dog-food dish — and sure wish I’d come up with the idea for it first!