Outward Hound Kibble Drop Food Toy with Thimble and Bugsy

Chewy.com sent us an Outward Hound Kibble Drop Food Toy to review this month. We were sent the toy for free in exchange for a review, but received no other compensation and this review is our entirely honest experience with this toy.

Koira is something of a genius when it comes to food toys. But I was planning to visit a friend for a few days who has dogs who are a bit slower with this kind of thing, Bugsy and Thimble. 

I filled the toy with kibbles and let them go to town, with a little supervision.



Bugsy (the border collie) figured pretty quickly that the easiest way to empty this out was to just grab it and walk away. But, once the kibble spilled during that stunt was cleaned up, Bugsy figured out the toy pretty quickly. He is normally a dog who just inhales his kibble super fast, so using this toy helped slow him down a bit. Obviously for this, we just filled the toy with kibble. To make the game last longer and be a little harder, you can drop just a few treats or kibbles in the top of the toy and have the dog have to figure out which part they ended up in.

Next up, we made Bugsy sit on the couch so that Thimble would have a change to figure out the toy and get her dinner.



Thimble was somewhat reluctant to interact with this toy. She can be weird about new things sometimes, totally contrary to her otherwise super confident self. The video really shows how I was encouraging her to get into it and play with the toy. The video stops right before she figured it out (the phone used to video ran out of memory right then, of course). But she did figure it out, and once she emptied one section of the toy, she moved on to the next. I think filling the toy with kibble like this is a great introduction to the toy, because the dog is heavily rewarded for interacting with it, and there is a lot of scent from the kibble for the dog to be tempted by. Once the dog gets the hang of it, of course, you can make it last longer by tossing just a few kibbles or treats in so the dog has to figure out which doors are hiding the treats by either going through all of them, or by using their nose.

Overall, this toy was a big hit with Bugsy, and Thimble enjoyed it too once she figured it out. I would not leave this toy unsupervised with a dog, as it would be relatively easy for a dog to chew to pieces. Supervised, though, it is sturdy enough to give you a chance to intervene if your dog is bent on destruction like Bugsy attempted in the first video.

I think this toy was fun, and a different way to feed your dog or play with them. It can be used to slow down super fast eaters, to give your dog a bit of a challenge, an alternative to feeding out of a bowl, and a chance to challenge your dog's nose a bit.