Product Review: Kyjen's Paw Hide

There are a ton of dog products out there- toys, leashes, harnesses, collars, bowls, feeders, the list goes on. I have recommended all kinds of products to clients (and friends and family) but I always have to add that "there is the chance it won't work for you/your dog as it has for me/other clients/friends/colleagues." Some dog related products can be pretty pricey and I don't want my clients wasting money on something that doesn't work as planned.
In light of that, I have decided to start adding product reviews to this blog. I have wholesale accounts through a couple of companies so I buy extra items to keep for myself for Roxie to try so I have a good idea of how they work before I go selling or recommending them to clients.

This time, it's the Kyjen Paw Hide:



Using Roxie as our guinea pig, we tried out out for dinner time when it first arrived. To he honest, I'm not sure who was more excited- our son, myself or Roxie.

To fill it is pretty easy; we just split up the 1/2 cup she gets for the meal into the 7 compartments, then place the yellow covers in them. At this point, we only fill some of them and do a couple rounds of searching so she is busy a bit longer. She definitely gets a little frustrated by the empty ones, but does still flip them over just in case, quickly moving on when they are empty. She doesn't try using her paws to flip the whole thing over at this point. There are actually little no-skid pads on the bottom to help prevent this and prevent it from sliding around, but as you can see in the video, it was still moving around a good bit on our kitchen floor that first time. On the carpet it's just fine so that's what we do-we have a toddler so we have crumbs to vacuum up all the time anyway!

I have uploaded videos of the first and fourth time she tried it out and she really seems to like it, despite the fact that it's a relatively simple puzzle. The first time, it took her about two and a half minutes to empty all compartments (with our son's help), in the second video she's down to just under two minutes.

We don't use it every day; we alternate between two food dispensing balls that she rolls around the house, a Kyjen Slo-Bowl (I'll do a review of that one later!), her regular bowl, and this one. It depends on how much time we have, how much our son wants to 'help' her and how much extra dish washing we feel like doing. It is dishwasher safe, but we tend to wash big stuff like this by hand to save room for all the cereal bowls that we go through. It dries pretty quickly after washing, so if we were less lazy it would be do-able for breakfast and dinner for her. It's made of material that is FDA approved for food, and seems to be holding up pretty well to Roxie's use of it. Like I said, she's not using it every meal, probably 2-3 times a week and it's still looking good after 3-4 months. Upon close inspection there are a few scratches but so far so good!

As far as puzzles go, this one is pretty easy for Roxie, but she really seems to like it, though it could just be that she likes food a lot. This is why we sometimes do a couple rounds of searching with it, so she gets more fun and we get more use out of it. I think this is a great starting point for young dogs or unsure dogs to build come confidence skills and burn some mental energy while using natural instincts to search out food.

Here's a link to the Kyjen website, it's also on Amazon and your local dog trainer may also have it available for resale ;)

http://shop.kyjen.com/paw-hide.html

Does your dog have a favorite food toy?