4 Ways to Keep Your Dog's Mealtime Fun and Interesting

If you were fed chicken noodle soup two times a day for years, you’d get bored. Your pet feels the same way. How can you make dog mealtime fun and more challenging for your pet?

Here are some ways to bring the fun back to mealtime for you and your dog.

1. Use a food dispenser

Food dispensers are great for ensuring your dog doesn’t scarf down their food or a treat too quickly and make dog mealtime a bit of a challenge. The best dog food and treat dispensers challenge your dog to discover how to get more treats or food from the toy. They dispense dry dog kibble a few pieces at a time, or they can lick wet dog food from the toy.

It’s fun to watch our dogs discover and being rewarded while eating. Food dispensers are also great to relieve boredom from eating out of the same bowl every day. Depending on the toy, it can provide a bit of physical and mental exercise too.

Always choose a food dispenser that is made for your dog’s size and give it a good cleaning after each meal, especially after wet food.

2. Try Puzzle toys

Does your dog suffer from bloat or gas? Slowing their eating can help, and puzzle toys are a great way to ingest less air while eating.

Some popular puzzle toys for dogs include:

• A slow feeder: These are bowls with many crevices for the food to fall into. Your dog needs to work a bit harder to get the food.

• Lick mats: These are usually silicone mats with bumps and smaller crevices. You smear wet food over the surface, and your dog licks the surface to retrieve the food.

• Snuffle mats: If your pet likes to forage, a snuffle mat is a great puzzle feeding toy. These mats are usually made from fleece strips tied to a mat (it resembles a fun rug). You can hide treats within the fabric strands, and the dog can exercise its natural canine foraging skills in a fun, safe environment.

• Wobble bowl: Most dogs consider Wobble bowls an easy-level puzzle toy. Place your kibble or hard treats in the bowl and close the lid. The dog must figure out how to “wobble” the bowl, so the treats slip out small slots in the sides.

• Rolled-up towel: Lay a clean towel on the counter and spread dry kibble across the surface. Roll up the towel and watch as your dog learns to unroll and discover their treats.

3. Freeze their food

In the summers, help keep your pets cool, hydrated, and fed by freezing their favourite foods in ice cube trays. Take your dog’s favourite wet food, freeze it in the trays, and feed the frozen cubes to your pet on a hot day. Just a heads up that this can get a bit messy, so you may want to feed your pet on easily cleanable tile or laminate floors or outside on the patio.

4. Introduce combination and rotation feeding

Combination and rotation feeding are great ways to add variety to your dog’s meals.

For combination feeding, pick complementary wet and dry dog food formulations (like the Go! Solutions Skin + Coat Care Chicken Recipe with Grains dry food and the Go! Solutions Skin + Coat Care Shredded Chicken Recipe with Grains wet food). To mix 50/50, use the feeding guidelines for each and provide half as much daily.

With rotation feeding, you can pick a few of your pet’s favourite dry or wet foods and change them up every week or every month. This can provide your dog with increased nutritional balance and change their routine to add some fun to dog mealtime. Some dogs may not be suited to this feeding style or may need transition periods between changing up their foods, so consult with your vet for advice. Check out the Go! Solutions Sensitivities kibble recipes as they are formulated with the same base ingredients for easy rotation feeding.

Recommended Solution

Limited ingredient recipes for your canine friend

Our Go! Solutions Sensitivities recipes are specially formulated by experts to help dogs suffering from food sensitivities.

Sensitivities™ Recipes

Making mealtime fun for your dog

Your dog gives you companionship and love. Show your love back by turning boring mealtimes into fun physical and mental exercise with these four tips for making dog mealtime more fun and interesting.

We shared some great ways to keep your dog engaged, prevent overeating, and add in a little playtime. To get started, choose the best dog food with high-quality ingredients and flavour. It’s the first step to making pet mealtime fun and healthy!