13 AugEpisode 20 | Wonderful “Work To Eat” toys: Slow Food Bowls
Every time you feed a dog, you have the opportunity to channel some of her energy into an appropriate activity, to tire her out, and to give her a sense of purpose. "Work To Eat" toys provide dogs with jobs, and dogs like to be employed! If we don't give them jobs, they too often make up their own jobs, alerting you to every sound in the hallway, or redesigning the couch cushions with their mouths.
There are lots of kinds of "Work To Eat" toys. In this episode, Annie talks about one type: Slow Food Bowls. These kinds of toys can be used with any kind of food or treat (wet, dry, raw or frozen), and are no harder to use than a regular bowl.
Subscribe: iTunes
Check out our favorite Slow Food Bowls at StoreForTheDogs.com
Transcript:
Annie:
Hi, my name is Annie Grossman and I'm a dog trainer. This podcast is brought to you by School for the Dogs, a Manhattan based facility I own and operate along with some of the city's finest dog trainers. During this podcast, we'll be answering your questions, geeking out on animal behavior, discussing pet trends, and interviewing industry experts. Welcome to School for the Dogs podcast.
**music**
Annie:
Hey everyone. So Anchor, which is the wonderful company that hosts this podcast has just launched a really cool new feature. And they've asked us to be one of the first podcasts to try it out. It's called listener support. Today is the very first day they're making this available. And basically it's kind of like a tip jar. So if you enjoy this podcast and you want to support it in some small way, let me know that you're listening and you're into it. You can sign up to give a monthly amount, either 99 cents, $4.99 or $9.99. And that recurring contribution will go straight back to helping produce this podcast. All you need to do is go to any browser, type in anchor.fm/dogs, and then just go ahead and click that listener support button as a special thank you. During this launch of this new feature, the first five supporting listeners will receive a School for the Dogs bandana. So go ahead and check it out and thanks to the folks at Anchor for inviting me to be a part of this launch.
**music**
Annie:
So today we're going to talk about work-to-eat toys, specifically, slow food bowls. And let me tell you, I have exerted a lot of brain power and a lot of time trying to figure out how to approach the topic of work to eat toys, because there's so many great work to eat toys, but they're like different kinds of work to eat toys. So my conundrum has been well, do I just try and cover all of my favorite work to eat toys in one episode, or do I talk about just a specific variety of work to eat toy, or do I mentioned a single work to eat toy in every episode, and, I'm not sure what the right answer is, but what I've decided to do is to start out talking just about slow food bowls. And I hope that I will have an episode soon where I'll cover some other kinds of work to eat twice. I'm not sure how I'll do that yet, but the reason I want to start with slow food bowls is because I think they're kind of like a gateway work-to-eat toy. They're really easy to use. But anyway, let's back up for a second.
So if you haven't heard the term “work to eat” before, we use this term to refer to a whole sort of wide category of toys that give your dog a challenge at mealtime. Of course you could also use them with treats, but I think they're great to use with meals because they help give your dog something to do. They help engage your dog's brain. And my opinion is that most of the problems that dogs face in the modern world stem from some degree of boredom. So many dogs just literally spend a lot of time alone and they spend a lot of time not challenging their brains very much. And, you know, dogs evolved to have jobs, to kill things, to chase things, to help us, to guard us. And if your dog's life involves little more than walking around the block a couple times a day, and then trekking from the sofa to the kitchen for breakfast and dinner, you basically have an unemployed dog who is going to start trying to make up his own jobs.
And those jobs are probably not going to be jobs you would like your dog to have–say, letting you know about every person that is in the hallway, or redesigning your coffee table with his teeth. All animals have this seeking drive this drive to figure things out, to problem solve. It's part of what has helped us evolve to be such engaged, successful species. And I say this about all animals, because if you're an animal who's not extinct, you have figured out how to do things in this world to keep you alive. It's why we read 30 different reviews on five different sites before we buy something. It's why on the subway you see so many people bent over their phone playing various games. I always think, especially when I see people playing like numbers games on their phones, I'm like, didn't you just probably leave a job where you sat for eight hours a day looking at numbers, and now you're just voluntarily putting numbers in order on your phone? Yes, yes, but that's what we do. We like to put things in order. And a part of the fun of being alive is problem solving. Even when you're solving a problem that is not desperate for a solution.
So by giving our dogs little challenges at meal time throughout the day, we can give them appropriate problem solving activities. And not only will this help hone their energy, and I think just help exercise their brain to make them generally smarter. It also makes them eat more slowly. And the more time your dog spends eating, the less time your dog has to do annoying things. It's energy that's being killed doing something appropriate rather than energy that could just as easily be used doing something annoying.
My dog Amos has Cushing's disease, which for him, makes him hungry pretty much all the time. So I give him, I would say 99% of his meals in work to eat toys of some kind, because the more time he spends eating, the longer the meal takes, the less time he is bugging me because he's hungry. And also the more time he spends eating, the more it tires him out. And you know what? That 1% of time where I maybe don't feed him in a work to eat toy, what I usually do is just toss the food on the ground. So at least he has to go looking for bits and pieces. It's a little bit more of an engaging activity than just having it in a bowl.
Of course, another advantage to feeding in toys is that eating slowly is generally better for your dog's gastrointestinal system and will usually help your dog produce less gas, and let's face it. There's nothing cute about dog farts.
**music**
So like I said, there are like six or seven different types of work to eat toys. And I have a breakdown of different sorts of work to eat toys. If you go to schoolforthedogs.com/worktoeat/. And I recommend toys in all of these categories, but like I said, for the sake of simplicity, I thought I would start with just one category of these toys: slow food bowls.
So you've probably heard of the slow food movement. Well, slow food bowls have absolutely nothing to do with the slow food movement. I actually often refer to them as “bowls with stuff going on in them” because that's really what they are. They're bowls with sort of weird shapes and things sticking out of them that provide little obstacles for your dog's mouth to encounter while he or she is eating. And like I said, I think these are sort of a great starter toy because using a slow food bowl is absolutely no harder than using a regular bowl. All you need to do is dump the food into it. You can use wet food, you can use dry food, you can use treats, you can smear peanut butter. You can basically put anything into a slow food bowl that you would put into any regular bowl.
Another nice thing about slow food bowls is that you can, at least a lot of the different kinds of them, you can stack. And I like that feature of them because I often will put my dog’s wet food in a slow food bowl and then freeze it to make it extra hard, to make it take an extra long time for him to eat. So at the beginning of the week, I'll usually portion out his food for the week into a bunch of slow food bowls and then just stack them in my freezer so they're ready to go.
So I just want to mention some of my favorite, slow food bowls. I really like the Northmate Green Feeder, which is made by Northmate, a Danish company. It's been around for about six years. And it looks like it's oval shaped, it's green as its name suggests, and that it looks kind of like highly stylized grass, like grass that would only exist in a Super Mario World. It has these like 40 or so oval shaped grass-like pieces sticking out. They vary in height from maybe like an inch to two or three inches and your dog simply has to eat around them. There's also a little lip around the whole toy, which is nice because it means you can put some water in there too, and it will hold that. And this is a great toy because you can put it in a crate. It won't move around a lot. It's pretty easy to clean, it's dishwasher safe. And, super pro tip: If it's too easy for your dog, you can actually flip it over and put food in it that way. Uh, so that the food falls into each of the little sort of grassy shaped oval thingys, and that makes it extra challenging.
The same company also makes a pink version of this toy. They call it “The Catch,” but I call it the Northmate Pink Feeder because it's basically the same thing. It's just pink, the blades of grass are sort of taller and spikier, not spiky like dangerous, although, it does have a kind of weird, like alien sex toy look to it. But they actually market that one specifically to cat owners, but I find dogs can generally use it just as well, except maybe with the exception of like very flat faced dogs. It might be harder for them, but I've seen dogs use it with their paws. And I've also seen dogs just be able to use their tongues to stretch their tongues to their tongues’ limit in order to get the food out of it. Again, I really liked both these toys because they're super sturdy. I've had one, uh, that I've been using with Amos for like four or five years.
I've recently discovered a similar toy that's made of silicone. I actually don't know what the official name of this toy is, but at School for the Dogs, we call it the rubber Shark Fin Bowl. And it's kinda the same thing, it's just made of rubber, which is kind of nice because you can very easily pack it. You can very easily fold it up and throw it into a bag. It's also oval shaped, but I've seen people cut it into a circle and actually place it inside of a bowl. If you want to do that, that works. I wouldn't suggest it for dogs who are hefty chewers. I wouldn't leave a dog alone with it for a long time because I think a dog might rip it up, but it is a nice alternative.
And, and by the way, I mentioned that the Northmate catch feeder or the Northmate pink feeder is marketed to cat owners for cats. Cats can use all of these toys as well. And I think cats are just as much victims of boredom as dogs are. So I highly recommend feeding cats in toys as well.
Another toy I really like is the Buster Dog Maze, which is actually also Danish and was actually invented by the same man who invented the Northmate green feeder. His name is Frederik Lindskov. The Buster Dog Maze has this kind of undulating spiral shape in one large molded piece of plastic. And I actually just think it's really cool looking before I even knew what it was when I saw it at a, uh, at some sort of expo. I was like, what is that? It just, it comes in black and in these jewel shade colors. And I don't know. I just think it looks neat.
And, same idea. It provides a challenge for your dog's mouth. My dog kind of flicks his food through it until it gets through the spiral maze. It can be pretty fun to watch, but like I've said, I've seen dogs use their paws to get food out of it. There is more than one solution to this puzzle. Outward Hound is a brand that also makes a bunch of these kinds of maze bowls. Theirs are circular, the Buster dog maze is kind of like an apostrophe shape, but, theirs are circular and they have a bunch of different kinds of molded designs within the bowls. So it's kind of fun to get a couple of them, like I said, they stack really easily, but that way you have a slightly different challenge to give your dog at every meal.
I will link to all these products in the show notes, but I also wanted to mention some kind of DIY versions of slow food bowls. Perhaps the simplest thing you can do to slow down your dogs, eating and give them a bit of a challenge is to plop a whole bunch of tennis balls in their regular bowl. When you feed them. Of course, if you have a dog who has a tendency to eat tennis balls like mine does, or who's obsessed with tennis balls, it might not be the best idea, but it certainly is one option. Although my preference would really be to use like lacrosse balls or GoughNuts, which are super, super sturdy, heavy duty balls made for dogs, G O U G H N U T, they're called GoughNuts. Since tennis balls can be abrasive on dogs’ teeth.
Another little hack that you can do, and I do this pretty frequently when I'm at someone's house and I want to give Amos something to do to keep him occupied is simply get a ice cube tray, right? And if you're at someone's house, they probably have an ice cube tray they can give you. Empty it out so there's no ice in it, flip it over and then just sprinkle food over the ice cube tray. Or sometimes you don't even need to flip it over. It kind of depends on the shape of the specific ice cube tray, but it's a similar idea as any of these other feeders as something like the Northmate Green Feeder, where there are little protrusions sticking out and your dog has to get stuff out of the nooks and crannies.
You can do something similar with a muffin tin, flip the muffin tin over and sprinkle the foodso that your dog has to get the food from in between the negative space where the muffins go. Or of course, like I said, you would same thing with ice cube tray. You could flip it the other way and sprinkle the food where the muffins would be. You can also put the food in the recessed parts and then put balls or toys over those recessed parts. Or if you want to get really fancy, you could put a Kong toy over the recessed parts and even freeze the toy into those parts. But again, the idea is the same. You are making a problem for your dog to solve out of this very common kitchen tool.
So those are some of my favorite slow food bowl hacks, and some of my favorite slow food bowls that are on the market. Tthis is by no means a comprehensive list. I just wanted to mention some really great ones that are out there. If I didn't mention a certain kind of slow food bowl that you're a big fan of, please let me know. I might not have heard of it. And I would be curious to learn about it. Email me at podcast@schoolforthedogs.com.
**music**
On the topic of dog farts–and like I said, reducing gas is a really good reason to use slow food bowls with your dog–A fun dog fact of the day. Did you know that April 8th, since 2014 has been celebrated as National Dog Fart Awareness Day. Now, I'm not sure how legit this is. I can't figure out who dreamed this up. But it is apparently a thing. So, if you know anyone whose birthday is April 8th, you can let them know that they now have to share their day with, uh, this auspicious holiday.
**music**
Woof Shout Out goes to my mom's dog's Sketch. Sketch is a senior dog. He is a Yorkie Shih Tzu mix, and he is hilarious for lots of reasons, one of which is he vocalizes in really funny ways, especially when he's hungry. And he has been using both the green Northmate feeder and the Buster dog maze bowl for years to help slow him down. And according to my mom, he went from eating his food in about 30 seconds and then coughing like crazy because it was such effort to get it all down to taking something like six minutes now to finish his meal. So Frederik Lindskov who designed those toys, he has certainly made a big difference in the life of this one little dog.
Special thanks to jazz banjo Rex for his version of “Ain’t we got fun.” You can find him on YouTube at youtube.com/jazzbanjorex.
And once again, if you enjoy this podcast, please go to anchor.fm/dogs and hit that new listener support button, which will let you choose an amount either 99 cents, 4.99, or 9.99 to donate monthly to this podcast, which will help me keep it up. I will be super appreciative and thanks to the people at Anchor for inviting School for the Dogs Podcast to be part of the launch, this new feature.
Thanks so much for listening. You can support School for the Dogs podcast by telling your friends about it, leaving a review or shopping in our online store. You can learn more about us and sign up to get lots of free training resources when you visit us online at schoolforthedogs.com.
Links:
SFTD’s recommended Work-to-Eat Toys
Northmate Green Feeder – Slow food bowl
Northmate Pink Feeder
Silicone Shark Fin Slow Food Bowl
Buster Dog Maze
Outward Hound Fun Feeder
