Horse enrichment helps your equine with boredom, encourages their creativity, and gives them a mental workout while they play with toys or solve puzzles. And sometimes, all you need is five minutes and some free supplies to make a fast but fun enrichment experience for your horse! We made a DIY horse toy from packing paper and a plastic tray for easy horse enrichment.
The tutorial comes first, but skip to the bottom if you just want to see the video!
Crumped Paper Equals Easy Horse Enrichment
I wrote recently on using cardboard shipping inserts for a unique, textured food puzzle for your equine friend. But that wasn’t all I found in the recycling bins: I scored some awesome long strips of packing paper.
Some of these paper inserts were almost five feet long!
I love packing paper and cardboard for DIY, easy horse enrichment because it’s simple to work with, easy to find, free (!!!), and very safe. This paper has no ink, staples, tape, or other stuff that shouldn’t be included in a make-your-own horse toy.
These packing strips were pre-folded so they were extra crinkly, and they were made of double lengths of paper crimped together down the middle. So they had built-in pockets for holding treats!
If you’re making this toy, you can use any type of paper, but repurposed shipping paper is definitely the most simple – and it’s usually free for the taking. Every school, office, or other workplace has a recycling area, and there’s a good chance you will find some of this stuff if you keep an eye out. If you can’t find any, you can buy a roll like this.
The crinklebox enrichment item works best if the box is shallow, since most horses don’t like to stick their noses too far into the material. Six to seven inches is deep enough to hold the paper in place but not too deep for your horse to comfortably nose around and find the treats.
Building the Crinkle Box
This enrichment item takes less than five minutes to put together. Just gather up the feed or treats you plan to use – you can use anything edible, including your horse’s daily feed – and the paper.
Scrunch up the paper and pack it into the box. You want it to be fairly tight.
If you have long strips of packing paper, you can either fold them into the box in one piece, as shown, or cut them into shorter lengths. Either will be entertaining for your horse.
Now it’s time to add the food.
Adding Feed and Treats to the Crinkle Box
You can use any horse-approved food for this enrichment, and as much or as little as you like. For the pictures and video, I used a combination of this horse’s daily feed (a pelleted ration balancer), some hay pellets for extra food without extra carbs and calories, and a small handful of pretzels.
The mix of food types creates extra interest and variety in this puzzle. Most of the pellets will gradually work their way to the bottom, so the more the horse snuffles and shuffles the paper, the more food will fall within reach. The pretzels are little surprise mouthfuls that will stay inside the paper until the horse noses the packing strips apart.
Where to Use this Easy Horse Enrichment
I used this demo crinklebox out in the pasture, but you can set it up anywhere! It’s a good choice for a stall activity because the paper is soft and safe. If you use it outdoors, pick up the paper after use if you want to reuse the crinklebox. If you leave the paper outdoors, it’ll get soggy from the ambient humidity and lose its crinkly, crumply texture.
Here’s the video of the enrichment in action!
For More Ideas
The crinklebox encourages your horse to use their minds and forage for their food in a natural way. This DIY puzzle enrichment is a take on a forage box, which has lots and lots of variations. For more ideas to promote feeding, foraging, and mental stimulation, check out the Treat and Puzzle Feeders page, and browse older posts for lots of different options for equine enrichment.