DIY toy guide
Laundry Basket Forage Maze
A slotted basket turned into a multi-level foraging puzzle
The ventilation slots in an ordinary plastic laundry basket are already the hard part of a foraging puzzle — add a few internal levels and some kibble, and a cat has to work through three dimensions to eat.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time
- 25 minutes
- Cost
- Free
🧺 You will need
- A plastic laundry basket with slotted or latticed sides
- Two or three pieces of stiff cardboard cut to fit inside at different heights
- Cardboard tubes and crumpled paper
- Scissors
- Non-toxic tape
- A portion of your cat's daily kibble or dry treats
🔧 How to make it
- Turn the basket upside down and check the slots — you want gaps a paw fits through comfortably, with no sharp moulding edges.
- Cut the cardboard pieces to wedge across the inside of the basket at two or three different heights, forming rough shelves.
- Cut generous holes in each cardboard shelf so kibble can fall from one level to the next when disturbed.
- Wedge or tape the shelves in place, leaving them slightly loose so they shift and drop food as the cat works at them.
- Scatter cardboard tubes and crumpled paper through the levels to make the food harder to see.
- Scatter kibble across all the levels, then turn the basket upside down over the whole arrangement.
- For the first few sessions, leave a few pieces visible at the edges so the cat understands there is food inside.
💡 Tips
Feed a portion of the daily ration through the maze rather than adding treats on top, which is the difference between enrichment and weight gain. Cats solve these faster than owners expect, so build in ways to make it harder: raise the shelves, add more paper, use smaller kibble. If your cat gives up quickly, the puzzle is too hard rather than the cat too stupid — take a level out and rebuild the difficulty gradually. Rotating it out of sight for a week restores most of the novelty.
📝 Notes
Twenty-five minutes with things already in the house. Foraging puzzles do more than pass time: eating in ten small efforts instead of one bowlful slows the meal, occupies the hunting circuitry that indoor life leaves idle, and helps with the begging and night-time waking that follow from a cat with nothing to do.
