Choosing the Right Toys for Your Pet
Match the toy to the instinct it satisfies, and check it for the hazards owners miss.
The best toy is the one that satisfies a real instinct. Everything else ends up under the sofa within a week.
Match the drive
- Dogs: chewing, shredding, fetching, sniffing. Rotate between a durable chew, a tug toy and a snuffle mat.
- Cats: stalk, chase, pounce, kill. Wand toys with feathers beat anything that sits still.
- Small pets: chewing and tunnelling. Apple wood, cardboard and hay-stuffed toys.
- Birds: foraging and destruction. Toys they can take apart are doing their job.
Safety checks
Squeakers, plastic eyes, bells and long strings are all swallowable. Cut loops that a leg or head could go through. Check chew toys weekly and bin anything with pieces coming loose. For dogs, if you cannot dent it with a thumbnail it is hard enough to break teeth.
Rotate rather than accumulate
Keep three or four toys out and the rest away. Swapping them weekly makes old toys interesting again and costs nothing.
Puzzle feeders
Feeding through a puzzle or snuffle mat turns a thirty-second meal into fifteen minutes of work. It is the cheapest enrichment upgrade for almost any species.
