Let it blow, rain or snow outside during the dark winter days, or thunder quietly during the New Year. We have three fun tips for you to keep your pet busy and distracted inside! Tip 3: kibble hunt.

Before you get started, a few things are important:

  • Always supervise, don’t leave your animal alone during this activity.
  • Tearing up paper and cardboard during this game is allowed, but not eating it!
  • Are you going to put several animals to work at the same time? Make sure that there’s no competition and aggression.

Scavenger Hunt

It’s one of the biggest home, garden and kitchen regrets: running out of toilet paper. But from now on you'll be happy when you see an empty roll: because you have another item for your collection to organize a snack hunt!

What you need:

  • All kinds of empty cardboard boxes and cartons: egg cartons, shoe boxes, you name it!
  • Empty toilet rolls and/or kitchen rolls.
  • Scraps of (gift) paper.
  • A handful of kibble. You can just use part of their daily meal for this.

What you need to do:

  • Make sure all packaging is clean and remove any sharp staples and loose pieces of tape. Don’t use boxes that smell strongly of detergent, for example. This is not nice for the dog's nose.
  • Sprinkle and hide some kibble in the boxes and stack them together, fill some empty rolls and wads of paper with kibble and add them.
  • Your dog can now hunt for the kibble! Guide and help him if needed.

Just make it up as you go along!

Use your imagination to put together the perfect kibble hunt for your animal. You can keep the game very easy by just putting the boxes with some kibble in them loose, or make it difficult so that your pet has to really tear and unpack to get the treat. By the way, you do not have to make it very difficult to offer your pet lots of fun: dogs often find sniffing in itself so great, that they sometimes just sniff over the treats!

Tip!

Do you want to give your dog extra sniffing power? First put the kibble you are going to use for hiding in a plastic container together with a few drops of salmon oil and shake it for a while to distribute the oil and let it soak in. So they smell extra good! Salmon oil is also good for the coat of your furry friend.         

Something for your cat?

Cats love boxes and wads of paper. So, just like your dog, let them hunt for their own kibble!

  • Look here for tip 1: Sniff something out of the milk chunks
  • Look here for tip 2: The man with the hammer
Also interesting:

Annerike from the CareTeam

Questions about your pet's behaviour? The CareTeam loves to help you with free advice!