Nina Ottosson Dog Treat Maze

Enrichment is really a scheduling problem. A dog needs something to do at exactly the moment you have least capacity to provide it — the work call, the hour before dinner, the wet Sunday afternoon — and the only things that genuinely help are the ones that keep going without somebody running them.

This one is a saucer that dispenses. Treats or kibble go into both sides of the hole in the top centre, and come back out through two separate release points, one on each side of the saucer, as the dog puts the whole thing in motion. Loading it from both sides is what makes it worth doing: a dispenser with one exit gets parked over by a clever dog, whereas two means the food keeps arriving from wherever the saucer happens to be pointing. It is 18CM across.

• 18CM across
• Saucer shape, dispenses as the dog moves it
• Two release points, one on each side
• Loaded through the hole in the top centre, from both sides
• Takes treats or ordinary kibble
• A Nina Ottosson design

Very little has been published about this one. Nina Ottosson grade their puzzles by difficulty and nothing supplied to us states the grade of this one; there is also no material, no washing instruction, no weight and no guidance on which size of dog it suits. Two practical things follow. Take it off a dog that decides the answer is to chew the puzzle instead of solving it, because at that point it has stopped being enrichment. And count whatever goes into it as part of the day's food rather than as extra, which matters most for the dogs most likely to be given one.

Who it's for: dogs that empty a bowl in seconds and need the meal stretched out, and owners looking for something that occupies a dog in the same room without needing them to join in.