Biscuit ate like the bowl owed him money. Seven years old, thirty pounds, mostly beagle, and every meal gone in under a minute. Then he would stand in the kitchen and stare at me as if I had cheated him out of something. Last summer he started bringing food back up a couple of times a week, always on the carpet, never on the hardwood, which tells you something about his sense of humor. I bought the Outward Hound Fun Feeder Slo Bowl in the Notch pattern and put his breakfast in it the next morning. That was about six months ago. He still eats twice a day out of it.
Here is what the thing actually is, because the name oversells it a little. It is a plastic bowl, roughly eight and a half inches across and two inches deep, with a maze molded into the bottom. It holds two cups of food. It is dishwasher safe, and it is completely manual, which is a fancy way of saying there are no batteries and nothing to assemble. The ridges break up the straight line between the edge of the bowl and the pile of kibble, so a dog cannot just open his mouth and shovel.
The bowl that turned a forty second meal into seven minutes
This is the exact bowl sitting on my kitchen floor twice a day. Two cups, dishwasher safe, no batteries, no setup. If your dog inhales dinner and then looks around for more, start here.
Amazon See today's price on Amazon →Meals go from forty seconds to six or seven minutes
For six years breakfast was over before I finished pouring my coffee. The Outward Hound bowl has ridges running through the middle of the food, so there is no clean path from the edge to the bottom of the bowl. He has to nose around them. His meals now take somewhere between six and seven minutes, which is not dramatic on paper and feels enormous at seven in the morning.
He chews instead of vacuuming
The part I did not expect. Biscuit is not a chewer by nature, he is a swallower. Put his food behind a wall of ridges and he has to pick at it a piece at a time, and picking at it seems to remind him he owns teeth. It is not training and it did not fix the habit overnight, but it changed the mechanics of the meal enough that the gulping mostly stopped.
The meals that came back up got rare
I am not going to tell you this bowl prevents anything serious. Ask your vet about that and mean it. What I can tell you is what happened in my house. Last summer Biscuit lost his breakfast on the carpet maybe twice a week. A few weeks after we switched, it was once a week, then once a month. I have not scraped a meal off that carpet since August. Could be a coincidence. I will take the coincidence.
He settles after dinner instead of pacing the kitchen
A dog who eats in forty seconds has the whole evening left to look for a job, and a beagle mix with no job will invent one. The longer meal seems to give him something to finish. He eats, walks a lap around the kitchen, and lies down. Not every night is calm. Most nights are calmer than they used to be.
Two cups covers a full meal, so one bowl does the job
This sounds like a small thing until you have used a slow feeder that only holds a cup and had to refill it halfway through while the dog spins in circles and barks at your hands. The Fun Feeder holds two cups of dry or wet food, which is more than Biscuit's dinner. One scoop, one bowl, one trip to the kitchen.
Six months in, his breakfast takes him about seven minutes instead of forty five seconds, and I have not scraped a meal off that carpet since August.
It survives a school week in the dishwasher
Outward Hound says it is dishwasher safe and I have tested that claim on the top rack a couple of times a week, with hand rinsing the rest of the time. The rinse takes about a minute because food does not pack hard into the corners. After six months of daily use the plastic is scuffed. It is not cracked, it does not hold a smell, and it has not warped.
Wet food works in it too, not just kibble
The listing says dry or wet and I have run the wet half of that test. A heaping spoon of canned food smeared into the ridges takes him longer than a whole bowl of kibble ever did. It is also the messiest version of dinner, so I save it for days when the kitchen floor needed mopping anyway.
You can see how much he has actually eaten
With a regular bowl you never really know if the dog ate or inhaled. With the maze you can see what is left and where it is stuck. That turned out to be useful when I cut his portions back in the spring. I could see the difference at the end of the meal instead of guessing from the shape of his ribs.
It buys me ten quiet minutes before I leave
Breakfast used to be a two minute job. Bowl down, bowl empty, dog underfoot while I packed my lunch and hunted for my keys. Now he works at his food while I do all of that, and the ten minutes I used to spend being tripped over are the ten minutes I now spend getting out the door.
It is the smallest change I have made to his routine
I have bought other things for this dog that I regretted by week two. This one has been in daily use for most of this year, both meals, and I have never once thought about putting it back in the cupboard. The first three days he sulked and shoved it around the floor with his nose. On day four he got to work and stopped arguing.
What I'd Skip
The Notch pattern I have is the shallow one, and it suits a thirty pound dog who eats too fast. It is not the right bowl for every dog in the county. If your dog gives up and walks away when food gets difficult, a deeper maze mostly produces wasted food and a sad staring contest. Outward Hound makes three levels, so start at the shallow end and move up if your dog clears it too quickly.
I would also skip it if you free feed. Leaving kibble out all day in a maze means washing a maze twice a day for nothing. Same for water. This is a meal bowl, not a water bowl. And if your dog spends a lot of weekends in the truck, it is one more awkward eight inch object to pack. It lives on my kitchen floor and that is exactly where it works.
Six months, two meals a day, and I stopped scraping the carpet
The Outward Hound Fun Feeder holds two cups, goes in the top rack, and needs no batteries or setup. It will not train your dog. It will make dinner take longer than the time it takes you to pour a cup of coffee.
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