The Bowl That Slowed Down My Gulper

Murphy is a 6-year-old beagle mix, 28 pounds, and he has never once chewed his food. He gulps it. I put his bowl down at 7 in the morning and again at 5 in the evening, and both times the stainless bowl was licked clean before I had the coffee started, with him standing there looking at me like I had forgotten the rest of the meal. Then came the burping. He would walk into the living room, burp twice, and lie down.

I brought it up at his last checkup. Our vet did not turn it into a medical thing. The advice was to slow him down, and a puzzle-type bowl was the first thing mentioned, before anything else. That is the whole reason I went looking. I ordered the Outward Hound Fun Feeder Slo Bowl in September, the 11.8 inch one, and it has been in service twice a day ever since.

I did the thing I always do first, which is read listings for an hour. There are ceramic bowls with a tower in the middle. There are bowls with fins, and bowls that look like a sunflower. I wanted something I could wash in the sink without worrying about chipping it, and something wide enough to spread Murphy's whole portion out instead of piling it in one spot. That is how the Fun Feeder ended up on my list.

Here is what showed up. A wide, shallow bowl, about 11.8 inches across and roughly 2 inches tall, with a maze molded into the bottom. The pattern on mine is the one Outward Hound calls Notch. It weighs 13.76 ounces, there is nothing to assemble, charge or plug in, and the listing puts it at 4 cups of capacity. That is far more than a 28 pound dog needs, so his portion sits spread across the maze rather than filling it.

The first meal was funny and a little sad. He hit that bowl at his usual speed, got a mouthful of nothing, and backed up and stared at me. Then he went back in and started working the notches with his tongue. It took him several minutes. He was annoyed for about three days and then he accepted it as the way dinner works now.

Two months in, every kibble meal goes in that bowl. His water stays in a separate plain bowl and I have not changed that, mostly because he is a messy drinker and I do not need two bowls to clean. I hand wash the Fun Feeder after dinner each night, stand it up to dry, and it has not cracked, gone soft, or worn smooth in the notches.

He still eats fast. He just cannot eat fast. The bowl did not teach him anything, it made his own speed work against him.

What I do not love, since you asked. It is wide, almost a foot across, so it takes up real counter space when I am washing it and it does not sit neatly beside the water bowl. The notches hold onto the last bits of a wet meal, so hand washing is not optional. And 4 cups of capacity is more bowl than a 28 pound dog needs; I am using maybe a third of it and the rest is just empty maze.

There is a level question too. This is the Slow level, the mildest of the three they make, and it was still enough to stop Murphy cold for the first week. The other two are called Slower and Slowest, and the listing is clear that they are harder mazes. If you have a serious inhaler, starting in the middle of that range is tempting, but I would not skip past the first one without seeing how your dog handles it.

The other thing I noticed is that it gives him something to do. He is a beagle mix with a strong nose, and dinner used to be the fifteen least interesting seconds of his day. Now it is a few minutes of work, and afterward he is not standing in the kitchen staring at me at 5:04 in the afternoon.

Frank's take, for what it is worth. He thought I was buying another gizmo for the dog and said so. He now rinses it out himself when I am cooking, which is about as strong an endorsement as anything gets in this house.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you it is a bowl. Nobody's dog is going to be transformed by one. What it does is take a habit your dog already has and make it take longer, and for two months running that has been worth the counter space to me. I would tell you to look at the width before the pattern, because the wide footprint is the part that works; a narrow bowl with a divider in it just makes a fast dog frustrated. I would tell you to hand wash it and skip the dishwasher question entirely. And I would tell you that if your dog is coughing, gagging, or bringing food back up after meals, that is a conversation for your vet, not a shopping decision. Ours is the one who sent me down this road in the first place.