Wet days are when dogs get difficult. The walk was short, the garden is a swamp, and there is a great deal of unspent energy pacing about the kitchen. Turning food into a chase gives you an outlet that costs nothing but the biscuits you were going to hand over anyway: load, aim, fire, and a dog that was bored two minutes ago is now sprinting the length of the hall after its own dinner.

The launcher is handheld and worked one-handed, so you can sit down and keep going, which matters more than it sounds when the alternative is throwing a ball two hundred times. Because each shot lands somewhere slightly different, the dog has to watch, track and hunt rather than simply run to a spot, and that searching is where the real tiredness comes from. It works indoors along a hallway or outside across a garden.

• Launches small biscuits for a chase game
• Handheld and easy to aim one-handed
• Turns part of a meal into exercise
• Adds searching and tracking, not just running
• Works indoors or in the garden
• No batteries or set-up needed

Two things worth knowing. It is built for small, hard, roughly round treats. Soft, large or irregular ones will jam it rather than fly, so keep a bag of small dry biscuits beside it. And whatever you launch still counts as food, so take it off the daily ration. Do not aim at your dog, and skip this one entirely if you have a dog who guards food from other pets.

Who it's for: Energetic dogs stuck indoors on wet days, and owners who would rather sit down than throw a ball across the garden a hundred times.