Slow Feeder Bowl for Dogs and Cats 20 cm, Grey

Some animals do not eat their dinner so much as inhale it. This slow feeder is the low-tech answer to that: a shallow pentagon dish with a raised island in the middle, moulded into a maze of looping ridges and rounded pillars. Dry food scatters into the channels between them and the only way to reach it is nose first, one mouthful at a time. The supplier’s own comparison puts a bowl that normally disappears in about five minutes at closer to twenty in this one, which is long enough for the stomach to keep pace with the mouth.

It is moulded from glossy polypropylene, and the maze is fixed in the dish rather than sitting in it as a loose insert, so there is nothing to lift out, shift under a paw or lose in the washing-up. The pillars are deliberately low: a lower pillar is easier for a short muzzle to work around, and it leaves no deep crevice to scrub afterwards. Soft dimpled pads are glued into shallow recesses under the rim, which is what keeps the bowl from skating across a tiled kitchen floor while a determined dog leans on it.

At roughly 20 cm across and sitting low on the ground, it is a bowl for puppies, small and medium dogs and adult cats rather than for a labrador. The shallow food chamber matters most to flat-faced breeds – French bulldogs, pugs, Persians – who struggle with the steep walls of a conventional dish and can reach into this one without pressing their face into it. It also earns its place simply as a mealtime distraction for a pet that finishes far too quickly and then goes looking for something else to do.

The bowl arrives sealed in a clear bag inside a plain kraft box carrying nothing but its product label, with no assembly and no leaflet. It is made in two colours; this is the grey, which in the hand reads as two tones, a darker charcoal outer wall around a lighter grey maze.