DIY and budget horse enrichment alert: fruit shipping inserts make fantastic snuffle puzzles for horses! You can find these textured paper trays for free and use them to create an easy but satisfying food toy for your horse. This cardboard carton treat mat works with your horse’s normal feed or with tasty treats. It’s also instant to put together, and recyclable when your horse is done!
How to Use a Paper Fruit Shipper as a Horse Toy
These fruit shipping box inserts look a little like an egg carton – if the eggs were huge. They’re made for shipping apples, oranges, and other round fruit. The round depressions hold each fruit and give it support during transport, but they’re also the perfect size for your horse’s nose!
The other perk of a fruit shipping tray like this is their size. Egg cartons make great horse enrichment but create more challenge because of their smaller structure. The shipping tray is shallower and easier for your horse to navigate with their lips, whiskers. and teeth.
Just add treats or feed all over the tray and use in place of your horse’s usual feed bucket. It’s so easy!
What Behaviors Does the Fruit Carton Horse Toy Encourage?
Enrichment for horses is all about encouraging their natural behaviors. What’s natural about eating off a carton?
The better question is: what’s natural about eating from a bucket?
Buckets of feed are useful and important for getting the correct kind and amount of food into your horse, for their physical health. But mental and behavioral health is important too. Horses have sensitive whiskers and lips that are very good at finding food on a textured surface, because they’re adapted for grazing in open grassland.
This easy toy for your horse gives them the chance to use their bodies and senses in a similar way.
Sensory stimulation and natural behaviors like this are ideal for relieving boredom. As part of your horse’s enriched lifestyle, they can help with anxiety and improve your equine friend’s welfare.
Just like a standard snuffle mat, when you use the fruit carton shipping tray you’ll encourage scenting, snuffling, and nibbling/licking up the food.
The Setup
Score a fruit insert from the grocery. Ask the stocker at the produce section – if they don’t have any the day you come in, try again the next time. Produce departments go through a lot of cardboard each day so you’ll need to ask on a day they stock apples, avocadoes, tomatoes or similar foods.
They might be willing to hold some for you, or let you pick from the recycling boxes behind the store for ones that have gone out already. As always, check for wholesomeness. Don’t use an insert that has had a fruit squashed all over it!
Fill the dimples with treats in any arrangement you like.
You can use any food item, but small dry pellets work really well. They tend to roll around the carton, creating more challenge and making the toy last longer.
Offer to your horse and enjoy their response!
It’s that simple – and it’s really cute to watch their noses snuffle over the insert!
These can be a great way to offer snuffle enrichment to each horse in the stable without breaking the bank for multiple snuffle mats. You can often score a whole pile at a time from the grocer!
That’s a good thing because they aren’t meant to last a long time. The paper-based material won’t hold up to multiple uses with wet feeds. But since they’re a reclaimed item, often heading to the trash at the store, there’s no guilt in letting them be a single-use item. Just make sure they go into the appropriate recycling bin when your horses are finished snuffling!