The Best Food-Dispensing Toys
Why are food-dispensing toys so great for dogs? The Dog Trainer explains. Plus – 4 awesome toys that will keep your dog happy and busy.
Your dog is livin’ large, what with the free meals, the comfy sofa, and the regular outings for sniffs and exercise. But that easy life can get dull. Even with exercise and some /pets/dog-behavior/how-to-train-a-dog-with-food-rewards every day, she has a lot of empty time on her paws. Most dogs cope. But some, maybe many, develop boredom-related behavior problems – /pets/dog-behavior/how-to-get-your-dog-to-stop-barking-inside and chewing, for instance.Â
And even for dogs who are coping okay, life could be a lot richer.  This week’s burning question: Which food-dispensing toys are best for your dog?
If they were living on their own, scavenging animals like dogs would spend a large part of each day looking for things to eat. For most dogs, getting hold of food is the single most interesting and satisfying activity in the world. It occupies their brains and their noses and leaves them happily relaxed. It gives them something to do during /pets/dog-care/leaving-your-dog-home-alone. It keeps dogs from going stir-crazy in or when they’re recovering from surgery. And – a bonus – food-dispensing toys create little or no work for you.
Disclaimer: Just so you know, all of the toys I tested were bought at retail stores. I prepared this article before I found out that Kong is a sponsor of our photo sweepstakes. Whoops, advertising and editorial don’t always keep in the closest touch, do they? I considered rewriting my recs to omit the Kong and the Wobbler, but I really do love them. As for you, please choose any brand of safe, durable toy that’s fun for your dog.
What Makes a Good Food-Dispensing Toy
Good toys are durable, easy to use, and easy to clean. Perhaps no toy is absolutely positively 100 percent safe for unsupervised use, but the favorites I’ll mention have stood up well to life with energetic, hard-chewing dogs.
A word of caution. If your dog /pets/dog-behavior/dogs-who-guard-their-food, it’s usually wise to resolve those issues before you start using food-dispensing toys. Food toys can also heighten /pets/dog-behavior/how-to-deal-with-jealous-dogs, so if you have multiple dogs you may want to separate them at toy time. Take that as a given if you’ve been feeding them separately anyway.
The Kong
You’d be hard-pressed to find a dog trainer who doesn’t love the , a hollow rubber toy shaped like a three-snowball snowman. Kongs come in several sizes and hardnesses, including versions for puppies and old dogs and a Kong Extreme for super-tough chewers. I occasionally meet a Kong-destroying dog, but in general these babies stand up to long, hard wear.
Here’s what not to do with a Kong: throw it out there empty (boring!) or with some dry kibble in the hole (mildly interesting while it lasts, but it doesn’t last). The Kong’s entire purpose is to tire out your dog’s jaw. Make a cement of ½ canned and ½ dry food, stuff that Kong, and freeze overnight. Much better. If your dog gives up easily, let her get used to excavating un-frozen Kongs and then work your way up to Kongs frozen solid.
Kongs can go in the dishwasher, or you can soak them in a big bowl for a while and then scrub with a bottle brush. The excavation process gets messy, so you might want to have your dog lie on an old towel for her fun.
The Wobbler
The is shaped like a Kong, but instead of an open bottom, it has a single keyhole-shaped opening in the side. Top and bottom screw apart. Unscrew, add dry dog food, screw back together, and turn Dogalini loose. She bangs the Wobbler around with her paws and sends it spinning to knock out pieces of food. The toy is weighted, so it rights itself. It really travels, which makes it a great way to get a sedentary dog moving.
I started out as a Wobbler skeptic – the toy is made of hard plastic (“FDA approved,” according to the Kong website) and I thought for sure any dog with moderately strong jaws would shatter it. Nope. I have seen a Rottweiler and my own Pit mix go to town on Wobblers with good results. They could pick their Wobblers up, but the smooth surface kept them from getting a good chewing hold. Do make sure the same is true of your dog before you leave her and her Wobbler alone together.
The Wobbler is as easy to fill and clean as a dog bowl. Its big disadvantage is that the plastic is noisy on hard floors. It’s well suited for a “footy” dog, but “chewy” dogs easily learn how it works.
StarMark Treat Dispensing Chew Ball
The https://www.cleanrun.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=2927&ParentCat=53 (catchy name, eh?) is a squishy hollow sphere with openings at the poles through which you shove kibble. As your dog chews the sphere, pieces of food fall out. According to the manufacturers, the Chew Ball contains no latex, vinyl, or phthalates. Squishy though it is, it has held up well to frequent and vigorous use by my 80-pound Pit mix for at least a year.
The manufacturers would like you to use their proprietary treats, but dry dog food works fine as long as the pieces are too big to fall right out. As for me, the Treat Dispensing Chew Ball is the toy I hate to love. It’s a bit of a pain to stuff and it’s hard to clean. But oh my goodness, is it a dog-pleaser. Because chewing compresses the openings, it can take your dog a long time to extract all the kibble you put in. But individual pieces come out fast enough to keep his attention. And the texture seems to keep dogs coming back for more even when the Chew Ball is empty.
Zogoflex “Tux”
The looks like a hollow version of a molecule model from your tenth-grade chemistry class. My friend Adriann has a smallish Aussie Shepherd mix, Calvin, with the toughest jaws in Brooklyn. The Zogoflex Tux was made for Calvin, who came with two of them when Adriann adopted him. Here’s what she says:
“I never would have bought the Tux because the knobs are a little too big for my dog to chew, plus it’s kind of heavy (the knobs are solid) and not a good throw/bounce toy.  But if you put canned food in there and freeze it, it takes a really, really long time to get it all out.  Calvin just spent about 40 minutes on this thing!  It’s very sturdy and a good time-occupier.”
Adriann also says the Tux is easy to clean.
These four toys are just a taste of the many safe, durable, satisfying items available at pet-supply stores.  Look around, find one well-suited to your pooch, and take an easy step to make your dog’s life richer. Otherwise, that’ll be me some weekend morning, ringing your doorbell and asking to talk with you sincerely about the consequences of a boring life.
As always, send comments and questions to dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email. And you can talk to me on https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/The-Dog-Trainer/58431916698, where I’m The Dog Trainer. https://twitter.com/dogalini is me on Twitter. Thanks for reading, and have a great week.
About the Author
Jolanta holds professional certifications in both training and behavior counseling and belongs to the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She also volunteered with Pet Help Partners, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that works to prevent pet relinquishment. Her approach is generally behaviorist (Pavlovian, Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian learning theory) with a big helping of ethology (animal behavior as observed in non-experimental settings).
