Looking for an easy, no-tool treat puzzle for your horse? All you need for this swinging, surprisingly challenging horse toy are a few rice cakes and some rope! This equine enrichment project is tasty but low calorie, and great for stall or pasture. Here’s how to make it, step by step.
What’s the DIY Rice Cake Boredom Buster?
This easy DIY is a set of crunchy puffed rice cakes threaded onto a sturdy cord. You’ll hang it overhead to create a swinging, swirling treat puzzle for your horse.
The DIY rice cake boredom buster for horses looks like a toy. But to get more technical, it’s an enrichment item for your horse.
What is Horse Enrichment?
Enrichment for horses is anything we do that encourages natural behaviors and gives our horses more choices. It’s about creating the opportunity for them to use their mind and body in horse ways.
Enrichment is crucial because modern life can make a lot of behaviors impossible, and promotes chronic boredom.
Enrichment gives back the variety and stimulation your horse needs, by adding experiences and options to their daily life. It’s important for all horses, but is an absolute must for equines who spend time in stalls.
If behavior-based horse enrichment is new for you, this quick article is a must-read.
You can also take a deeper dive into what you and your horse will get out of enrichment here: Why Horses Need Enrichment
Why the Rice Cake Toy is Great Enrichment
This super cute rice cake boredom buster is a great example of a simple toy that offers a lot of interest and boredom relief.
It’s low cost, safe, and is easy to understand but challenging to solve (eat!). Horses can’t see right in front of their nose, so it takes work for your equine friend to grab each rice cake and crunch off a bite. They’ll need to use their whiskers and lips with a lot of fine motor control.
That makes this toy ideal for all horses, but especially great for:
- Young horses still learning dexterity and patience
- Older horses who prefer low-activity toys
- Anxious or worried horses who may be scared of other toys
Why the Rice Cake Toy is Great – for You
This easy DIY horse toy is great from your perspective, too. Some enrichment is really beneficial but requires a lot of work and time – like setting up an enriched pasture.
Other enrichment is easy to use but pretty expensive to purchase (looking at you, giant Hay Play ball).
The rice cake toy for horses is neither one. It’s inexpensive, quick to put together, and doesn’t take very long.
This toy is also ideal for group activities like pony parties or group enrichment builds.
It’s a great companion to other swinging toys like the bucket lid browse board or basic treat and hay-filled webby ball.
How to Make a DIY Rice Cake Toy for Horses
Ready to jump in? Here’s how to put this toy together.
Ingredients and Tools
- Rice cakes, plain or lightly salted (at least 4 or 5)
- Horse-safe cord such as cotton or braided polypropylene
- Carabiner clip or other attachment hardware
- Serrated knife
- Thin sharp tool for making holes in the rice cakes – paring knife, pumpkin-carving tool, X-Acto knife, or Philips screwdriver
Optional Extras
- Sticky stuff like peanut butter, molasses, or honey
- Crunchy or flavored add-ons like flaxseeds, dried herbs, or ground up feed
The Rice Cakes
The rice cakes should be plain or lightly salted. You don’t want extra coatings or ingredients that aren’t horse-safe, like chocolate or caramel. Just the regular, crunchy-granola health food type.
Part of what makes this such a good DIY horse treat is that rice cakes are mostly air. They’re made from just a little bit of rice, puffed with heat. The crunch and taste are exciting for your horse but very low in calories and carbohydrates.
I’m using regular old Quaker rice cakes. They should be easy to find in your local grocery, or you can order them online (this pack of 6 on Amazon is a good choice for a group enrichment activity).
The Rope
To make this hanging, free-swinging horse toy you’ll need at least 16 inches of horse-safe cord or rope.
Braided cotton or synthetic rope is the best choice.
Bailing twine is not a great option for this or other DIY horse enrichment items. It’s very thin and can easily slip between a horse’s teeth, possibly causing an accident. Enrichment safety is priority #1, so it’s best to take the time to source an alternative to bailing twine for your boredom busters.
The Extras
Part of what makes this do it yourself horse toy so much fun is adding tasty or crunchy extras to the outside of the rice cakes.
This creates endless flavor variety. As if this toy wasn’t fun enough, the flavor and texture add-ons mean that the rice cake horse toy doesn’t get old. If you’re working on a stall enrichment plan for an injured horse, you can use this or similar items several times in a week, changing the flavors each time.
I like using peanut butter around the edges of the rice cake. Peanut butter is tasty but very low in added sugar, so it’s the best choice for horses with metabolic concerns. It also doesn’t drip.
You can also use sweet options like molasses, honey, or maple syrup.
For texture or flavor additions, any horse-safe treat is fair game. Dry options work best, like flaxseeds, smashed crackers, or dried herbs.
Making the Rice Cake DIY Horse Toy, Step By Step
Step 1. Make the rope.
Cut a few feet of your rope or cord. Use more than you need, because the knots take up a lot of rope. You’ll cut away excess length at the very end, when the toy is finished.
Tie a large, blocky knot in one end. I like to make several overhand knots clustered together.
This knot will support the rice cakes and keep them from sliding off the end of the cord.
If you’re using a synthetic rope (not cotton), it’s a good idea to lightly burn the other end of the rope with a lighter. This fuses the rope fibers so that they won’t fray as you push the rope through the rice cakes.
Quick note: You can see a black crinkly cord in this tutorial. It’s from another enrichment item and gives my rice cake toy a little more length, but isn’t necessary for this DIY project. For yours, just use plenty of cord so that you can hang up the toy in stall or pasture at your desired height.
Step 2. Cut the Rice Cakes
To make this horse enrichment DIY, you’ll put a small hole in the center of each rice cakes and thread them onto the rope.
To give the toy more height with fewer rice cakes, we’ll also use some small chunks as spacers in between the full size rice cakes.
Set aside a few rice cakes – I used 3 for this tutorial but the exact amount is up to you.
Then, use a serrated steak knife to carefully cut the remaining 1 or 2 rice cakes into quarters.
Use a gentle sawing motion. Don’t try to chop through the rice cake or it will shatter into irregular pieces, and some will be too small to make the holes in the next step.
When finished, you’ll have 3 or 4 whole rice cakes and around 8 wedges.
Step 3. Make Holes in the Rice Cakes
This next part is a little fiddly, but once you have the hang of it, it goes pretty quickly.
You’ll want to use a sharp but thin object to carefully make a hole in the center of each piece of rice cake.
A very thin paring knife will work. You can also use a pumpkin carving knife, with its extra skinny blade, or a screwdriver.
Make the hole by turning your tool like a drill, not by trying to stab into the rice cake!
Practice on the wedges rather than the full sized rice cakes, because you’ll probably crack a few. But once you’ve done one or two, you’ll have the technique down.
Optional Step: Sticky Spreads
If you’re using sticky stuff and flavor add-ons, you can add them to the rice cakes now or after you string them on the rope.
Any of the sticky spreads from the licking mat tutorial will work great for this toy. And if you need more inspiration or info on each sticky option, this article covers 5 lickable options in detail.
Apply the peanut butter, syrup or puree to the outer edge of the rice cake. You can use a knife…but let’s be honest, the best tool for this job is your finger.
Your horse won’t judge you for licking your fingers afterward.
Optional Step: Flavor Add-Ons
Now, you’ll add flavor options to the outer edges of the rice cakes.
It’s a little like those peanut-butter-and-birdseed pinecone bird feeders you may have made in school or camp.
Any fine textured dry ingredient works for this DIY horse enrichment. You won’t use very much, just enough to coat the edges.
Any of these flavor add-ons are a great choice:
- Flax or chia seeds
- Dried kitchen herbs like mint, basil, oregano
- Crushed cereal
- Crushed pretzel
- A little bit of sea salt
- Horse feed blitzed in a blender
- Rolled oats
Place about ¼ to ½ cup of the add-on in a saucer or other container. Hold the rice cake by the middle and roll it like a wheel through the powder.
Repeat until you’ve rolled all the rice cakes.
Now it’s time for the best part: assembly!
Step 4: Assemble the DIY Rice Cake Horse Toy
Start with one of the small wedges of rice cake. Carefully thread the end of the cord through the hole and push the wedge all the way to the end of the cord until it reaches the knot.
Now slip a whole rice cake onto the string. Be careful not to let it flop around on the ground or table – hold the toy in the air as you work to keep the coatings in place.
Repeat with a wedge or two of rice cake as a separator, followed by another whole rice cake.
Repeat until you’re out of rice cakes and have a super cute stack on a string:
It’s almost ready!
To finish this DIY equine enrichment, you’ll need to tie off the cord and decide how to hang it up.
I recommend a figure 8 knot – the kind where you fold the cord back, then tie the double section on itself. Then, you can slip on a carabiner or other clip for easy attachment in your horse’s stall, from the eaves of a paddock shelter, or from a tree branch.
For safety, make sure that all knots are secure and that the toy doesn’t hang any lower than your horse’s withers.
Using Your DIY Rice Cake Horse Enrichment
Watching your horse have fun with this DIY boredom buster is the best part! A few things to note as you get ready for the fun, though:
This enrichment should be used under supervision. All horse enrichment that involves cords or rope should be supervised and then removed when the horse has finished.
Most horses will take to this enrichment item right away – it looks and smells like food! But if your horse does have a tendency to be nervous around new things, or doesn’t have much experience with enrichment, introduce this toy in an outdoor space before using it in the stall.
For other issues with using enrichment, you’ll find resources here:
Neophobia (Fear of New Things)
What To Do When Your Horse Ignores Enrichment
And that’s all there is to it!
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Related Enrichment
Looking for similar enrichment options for your horse? Try these:
DIY Browse Toy from a Bucket Lid