Does your horse eat fast? Do you have an easy keeper that only gets a small amount of feed each day, and it’s gone in a flash? A horse slow feeder may be a great addition to your feed room. Here’s a simple but really effective enrichment hack: repurpose an automotive floor mat into a DIY horse slow feeder! Keep going for why it works and how to do it.
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What’s a Horse Slow Feeder?
A slow feeder is any device that increases the amount of time it takes your horse to finish their meal. The humble haynet is a simple slow feeder. So are hay balls and treat balls. Slow feeders for horses extend feeding time and are a type of horse enrichment.
Enrichment items like slow feeders are good for your horse’s digestive health and mental health too. They encourage your horse to take small bites, eat slowly, and relax while eating.
Car Floor Mat as DIY Horse Slow Feeder?
Textured mats make great equine slow feeders. But unlike licking mats for dogs, it’s hard to find a feeding mat big enough for horses. Enter the repurposed rubber floor mat!
With a floor mat from a car or truck, you can make a DIY slow feeder for horses. It’s a simple way to make your horse’s mealtime more varied, natural, and healthful. And you can also use it with treats, not just pellets or grain!
The textured tread on a car or truck’s floor mat collects dirt from your shoes and protects the upholstery. When we repurpose the mat for your horse, it holds food instead.
Rather than bolting big mouthfuls of feed, your horse will have to use her lips, teeth, and tongue to take small bites. Your horse will work around and between the mat’s texture as they eat.
How Well Does the Floor Mat DIY Slow Feeder Work?
This horse enrichment hack is stimulating but simple for your horse to use. The texture on most mats isn’t too deep or complex, so it’s easy to eat from. Your horse will get plenty of feed from the top of the pile, then spend time working on the nooks and crannies.
This makes your DIY slow feeder mat great for all horses. It works whether your equine needs lots of mental stimulation or just a relaxing, natural way to eat.
After most of the meal is gone, many horses will use their tongue to lick up the last of the feed. The combination of feeding activities and extended feeding time can be great for relieving boredom and soothing anxiety.
In testing it out so far, I’ve found that meals on the mat take almost twice as long to finish as meals from a bucket. The horse seems to really prefer the mat, with fewer signs of anxiety during meals. Check out this article for results of our tiny experiment to see how well it really works!
Behaviors Encouraged by the DIY Floor Mat Slow Feeder
Enrichment for horses is all about encouraging natural behaviors. A textured feeding mat like this repurposed project encourages your horse to eat in a natural way. You’ll help your horse:
- Feed from the open ground in a natural way
- Snuffle and sort through the feed
- Lick and problem-solve to get the last of the meal from the treads
Why Floor Mats Make Awesome DIY Feeding Mats
Durability
Like a solid rubber feed pan, a good auto floor mat is almost indestructible. With normal use, your DIY rubber feed mat will last a long time. The rubber flexes instead of breaking when it’s bent or stepped on. This is a plus for safety as well as durability.
Easy Clean Up
Keeping enrichment items hygienic is important, and it’s easy with the rubber floor mat. Just blast off any leftover feed off with a hose or brush it clean in a sink. Rubber automotive mats are easy to clean by design, an extra benefit when you repurpose them as enrichment.
The Right Size
It can be tough to find horse-sized enrichment items without breaking the bank. Auto floor mats are designed to fill the whole footbed of your vehicle, so they’re nice and big. They range in size from 12×16 in or so up to more than two feet long. For their size, floor mats are extremely economical.
Finding a Mat for Your Horse Slow Feeder
Depending on where you live you’ll probably have a lot of selection in type and texture of floor mats. This is especially true if you’re in the United States where personal cars and their accessories are extremely popular.
Any moderately sized store will probably have at least a few to choose from at a good price. An auto parts store will have even more selection. It’s also possible to order floor mats online, but it’s best examine the mat in person to make sure that the texture is right for the horse’s needs. If you browse for a mat online, such as at Amazon, make sure there are good photos of the mat’s tread.
Lots of Options
Auto floor floor mats come in a ton of different styles and sizes. When I started browsing through the selection at just a few stores, I realized I had no idea how much variety there could be in such a common item.
You’ll want a solid rubber mat. They are available in vinyl or carpet, but rubber is the best choice: easy to clean, flexible, and durable. Some mats have a complicated tread with lots of nooks and crannies. These are ideal for horses who enjoy problem-solving and spending time working all the food out of the mat. They’re also great for minis, with their smaller teeth and tongues.
Other floor mats have less texture and are perfect for horses who need an “easier” version of this slow feeder. Treads and crevices that are too small will trap feed and make cleanup difficult, so browse until you find a mat with the right texture.
If you can, pick up more than one mat (or get new ones for your auto and repurpose the ones you have for your horse). It’s convenient to have extras for use in different locations. And the different textures offer increased variety for your horse.
I was able to find a set of four mats with a texture I really liked for at a discount store. The price worked out to about four bucks a mat, which is not bad for a horse toy! I bought the mats pictured in this article in person, but the same set is available on Amazon.
Preparing Your Mat to Use as a DIY Slow Feeder
If you’re repurposing mats from your own car, just pull them out and wash with soap and water. Use a brush to remove any dirt from between the treads. Rinse well and hang the mats up to dry. Easy!
If you buy a new mat, you might notice a strong fresh-rubber smell. The scent comes from molecules off-gassing into the air as a normal part of production. It’s not harmful but can distract a sensitive horse from their food.
To get rid of a brand-new mat’s smell, take it outside and clean it thoroughly with soap and water. When it dries, sniff and see if you still detect the strong rubber scent. If you do, the best way to get rid of the smell is a couple of days out in the sun. Just hang the mat over a fence or place it in a sunny location and let the warmth, open air, and UV light complete the off-gassing process. After a few days, the smell should be gone.
Using your DIY Horse Slow Feeder Mat
When the mat doesn’t smell like fresh rubber anymore, it’s time to use it! Just pick where you want to use the mat, prepare the horse’s feed as usual, and dump or spoon the feed onto the mat.
Car floor mat feeders work well with dry feed, but they really shine with soaked, squishy food that sticks in between the treads. This creates a double behavior opportunity. Your horse will eat the easy to bite food from the top of the pile, and then spend a long time nibbling and licking around the treads of the mat to get all the goodies. You can also get creative and find your horse’s own preferred texture and moisture level by doing a food preference test.
If your horse is an easy keeper and doesn’t eat a pelleted food at all, you can still use the feeding mat for enrichment. Just soak some hay pellets or puree some fruit or veggies to create the same experience. Anything that you would use on a plain smear board will work for the floor mat feeder.
If your horse is used to eating their grain from a bucket, there may be a bit of a learning curve as they adjust to food on a mat. Once they get the idea, many horses seem to prefer eating from a flat, unobstructed surface like a rubber mat rather than a bucket that encloses their face and pushes on their whiskers. If your horse is brand new to slow feeders, and especially if they are known to eat anxiously or quickly, you might want to start with a non-textured mat as a first step.
Where to Use the Floor Mat Horse Slow Feeder
This enrichment item is very versatile. Since it’s just a textured mat, you can use it in any location: stall, pasture, even in the barn aisle as a boredom-buster while you tack up or wait for a farrier appointment. Since most floor mats are sold as a set, you can also provide a whole paddock of horses with enrichment and slow, relaxed feeding for one purchase! You can also use an entire set with one meal for your horse, spreading the food across all the mats and offering multiple feeding stations in the pasture.
Have you used a car mat or other DIY items for a licking mat? How did your horse like it? Share your ideas and stories in a comment!
Related Enrichment Ideas
Check out these articles for more equine enrichment.
If you want to extend foraging time with a hay net, read this.
For a really engaging slow feeder option, check out this article on snuffle mats for horses.
For more fun with lickable, smearable equine enrichment, try a licking mat or smear board!
Thank you so much for this and all of your tips. I appreciate so much your attention to sagety and health issues. My horse is fortunate to have a large paddock. Since we are in California, it is a dry lot. Thanks to your suggestions, I can see how I can place a car mat on a torn/worn out stall mat and give him encrishment that way. Also, your blog has helped me realize that successful enrichment is most likely to include food.
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