Want an easy way to relieve equine boredom and give your horse some food variety? Make this cardboard horse toy for an exciting equine food puzzle! You can use a cardboard paper shipping insert as a food puzzle for a free and easy way to give your horse some mental stimulation. It’s simple, there’s endless variety, and your horse will think it’s awesome!
What is a Cardboard Horse Toy and Food Puzzle?
The cardboard horse toy is a really simple DIY food puzzle for horses. This simple horse enrichment uses free supplies and only takes a few minutes to set up.
Enrichment is all about natural behaviors and letting your horse be a horse. This toy and food puzzle lets your horse use their mind and practice their dexterity. It’s perfect for relieving boredom in the stall or pasture. And it’s really simple! The cardboard food puzzle takes five minutes to make and it’s free.
For this DIY horse enrichment, you’ll take a cardboard shipping insert used to cushion objects in the mail and add your choice of tasty horse treats.
See all the texture and different nooks and crannies? That’s where the food will go!
Why the DIY Cardboard Food Puzzle is a Great Horse Toy
This cardboard food puzzle isn’t just simple and easy. It’s really good enrichment for your horse.
Specially shaped feeders and similar food puzzles give your horse a new and exciting experience at mealtimes. They extend feeding time and provide mental stimulation. Getting food from a treat puzzle is different from eating a pile of food from a bucket or taking treats from your hand. With a puzzle feeder like this, your horse has to use different behaviors to get the food, and some brainpower too.
By adding simple enrichment items like this along with other food toys like equine snuffle mats, you’ll help your horse avoid boredom, express natural behaviors, and have a lot of fun.
This cardboard food puzzle is great enrichment because it’s just the right size and shape for some challenge as your horse noses around to find the treats. It’s also very safe, since it’s made of paper and can’t break into dangerous pieces, but it’ll hold up to horse use for several sessions. Since you can get cardboard shipping inserts for free, this enrichment is a perfect way to give your horse lots of variety as you experiment with different sizes and food arrangements.
What Behaviors Does the DIY Cardboard Horse Toy Encourage?
Enrichment is all about encouraging natural behaviors. If you put together this cardboard insert puzzle for your horse, you’ll get to see lots of different horse behaviors, like:
- Foraging and food-finding
- Using the senses, especially smell and touch
- Fine motor control and dexterity
- Problem solving and working through puzzles
How to Make the DIY Cardboard Horse Toy
The best part about this horse toy is that it offers a lot of variety. There are LOTS of different ways to put this item together.
I’ll show you how I used the different parts of these cardboard inserts to make two different feeder puzzles, and you can use those concepts to create your own. Every shipping insert is different, so yours will look a bit different from this one. Here’s how these two came together.
Step One: Find Your Cardboard Shipping Insert
You’ll need a cardboard shipping insert for this horse toy project. These are the textured, shaped pieces of cardboard that surround the goods in shipping packages.
You can get shipping inserts like this for free by checking the cardboard recycling of your workplace, school, or any large store. Ask for permission before you raid the recycling, but shops and big companies are usually completely okay with you taking home cardboard. They might look at you funny, but who cares? You’re an equestrian on a mission.
As soon as I saw these two inserts, I knew they’d make a great enrichment item because they’re a lot like a forage box – one of my favorite horse toys.
Which Way Up?
For these inserts, I knew that this long, shallow one had perfectly sized ridges for adding treats and forage:
But the smaller one looked too deep and narrow for my horse’s nose. It might have worked for a mini horse, but not a full sized one. If yours is similar, try doing what I did: turn it upside down!
Now we have two cartons a perfect mix of broad, shallow areas and deeper nooks and crannies, which is perfect for different types of horse feed and treats.
When you’ve decided which way you want your cartons to face, decide what food you want to use.
What Food and Horse Treats Are Best?
You can do any combination of food you like for this puzzle. You’ll want to adjust the type or size of the treats based on the shape of your cardboard insert.
I started with a wide range of different treats, plus this horse’s daily ration balancer. He only gets a pound of feed per day, so a puzzle like this is a great way to extend the feeding time without adding a lot of extra calories.
If your horse doesn’t get much or any grain or has a restricted diet, a puzzle feeder like this can be a really good way to increase their enjoyment around mealtime. You can use low-carb or low-starch treats for horses who can’t have a lot of sugar. Celery, cucumber, and peanuts make great additions to this puzzle!
Hay is also a great option, especially as a filler or to increase the challenge level. Any kind of hay or chaff can be used, and you can also use hay cubes or pellets. There’s endless room for variety with a simple enrichment item like this.
These deeper areas are perfect for filling with hay or long, skinny treats:
So I used some graham crackers, which stick up just enough for a horse to grab with their lips:
Making the DIY Food Puzzle
These two big cardboard inserts had lots of different options for adding food, so I was able to increase the enrichment value by making different “sections” of the puzzle. The graham crackers went in first, in the pockets of one insert for extra challenge…
…and just on the flat surfaces of the other insert for a simple, tasty option. Use flat cardboard inserts like this for a simple toy if your horse is new to enrichment.
A puzzle like this really stretches the food out. This is only one and a half graham crackers, broken into little squares. That’s awesome for horses who don’t need extra sugar or carbohydrates but aren’t completely restricted from treats. A little goes a long way!
For a really special treat, I used half a peach, cut into little bites. Adding a favorite fruit or vegetable makes this enrichment extra exciting for your horse. Since most horses are big fans of apples, carrots, and other fruits and veggies, adding them to the nooks and crannies of the insert can increase the challenge level and motivate them to use their minds to figure out how to access the food.
With a few chunks of peach wedged into the corners of the insert, I added some hay in rows:
Then I finished up with a sprinkling of the horse’s daily ration balancer feed. Take a look at how the feed is located both in the channels of the cardboard and on the “ridges”:
To finish up the second insert, I added wedges of hay in the small pockets to help conceal the fruit and crackers.
Then I sprinkled the rest of the ration balancer pellets in between wedges of hay. The hay stabilizes the pellets and keeps them balanced on top of the insert.
These two cardboard shipping inserts made just a little feed go a LONG way! Less than a pound of ration balancer, a few handfuls of hay, half a peach, and 1.5 graham crackers were all that I needed to make two puzzle feeders with lots of different sections and ways of getting the treats. That’s a lot of horse enrichment and mental stimulation with just a little food and five minutes of effort!
You can use any of these techniques when putting yours together. Make your cardboard food toy easy or challenging depending on your horse’s ability and needs.
Using the DIY Cardboard Horse Toy
You can give this enrichment item to your horse anywhere – in the pasture, stall, or even the barn aisle. If your horse likes to turn toys and puzzles like this over while they work on them, put the cardboard insert into a larger pan like a kiddie pool, mud tray, or rubber stall mat.
Most horses will go for this enrichment right away. If your horse is a little unsure of what to do, you can add easy-to-grab treats like fruit slices right on top, where the horse can immediately see or smell them.
Each horse will use this toy in a different way. Your horse might pick around the hay or reach carefully into the nooks and crannies with their nose, or they might lick the cardboard to scoop out the goodies. Some horses will just start with the easiest parts (the hay) and leave the more difficult sections for last.
If you’re lucky enough to use more than one at a time, your horse may move from one to the other several times, gradually working through the puzzle. Or they might eat all the treats from the first, before moving onto the second one.
My horse worked through the first puzzle, then immediately turned the second one over to knock out all the treats and ate them from the ground instead. That’s one way to solve the puzzle, I guess!
Safety Notes
One of the best things about this food puzzle for horses is how safe it is.
Some toys and enrichment items can be hazardous if not built or set up the right way. But this cardboard carton insert is almost completely bombproof from a safety standpoint. It’s nontoxic and sturdy enough for equine use but soft enough that it can’t poke or cut a horse.
It’s always a good idea to supervise your horse’s enrichment the first several times you use an item. The only major thing to watch for is accidental or intentional eating of the cardboard, but that’s not very common. If you’re not confident in what your horse may do with the item after they’re finished working on the food, just remove it when your horse is finished. Also, remember to check it for hygiene before using it again. After several uses, a cardboard toy like this won’t be in great shape. Since you can’t wash it, just recycle it when it gets messy or damaged.
If you’re in need of info on making toys and DIY enrichment safe for your horse, try our $5 ebook Safe Horse Enrichment available on Amazon. It’s a detailed read on how to make horse toys with safety in mind!
Go Puzzle!
Are you ready to raid the recycling for a shipping insert? If you make this puzzle feeder enrichment, we want to hear how it goes! You can share your stories in a comment below.
If you’re interested in more ways to use cardboard as a source of food puzzle enrichment items for your horse, you can try the super-simple fruit carton snuffler and this article on the humble but ultra-useful egg carton!
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