How to Make a Cardboard Box Foraging Game for Dogs

By Justin Shmalberg, DVM, CVA, ACVN, ACVSMR

Enrichment & Cognition · August 21, 2026 · 7 min read

A shipping box, three empty toilet-paper tubes, and a fistful of kibble will do more for an aging dog's brain in ten minutes than most bottles on a shelf.

I still remember a ten-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Biscuit, brought in by an owner worried that he’d “just gotten dull.” He was eating fine, still took the stairs, still greeted her at the door. But he’d stopped digging through the laundry basket for socks, stopped following scent trails around the yard on walks — the small, food-driven investigations that had defined him as a younger dog. His weight was steady at 16 pounds, bloodwork unremarkable. What his owner was describing wasn’t pain or illness. It was a drop in the drive to search. I sent her home with instructions to skip the food bowl for one meal a day and hide it instead, starting with something almost embarrassingly easy: kibble scattered inside an open shoebox. Three weeks later she texted a video of him elbow-deep in a taped-together box maze, tail going. Nothing about his diagnosis had changed. His engagement had.

What Sniffing for Food Is Actually Doing in an Aging Dog’s Brain

Searching by scent isn’t a party trick — it recruits a different, older part of a dog’s nervous system than walking or fetch does. A scoping review of scent-based activities for companion dogs, published through ScienceDirect, found that structured sniffing work is consistently associated with calmer behavior and better emotional regulation across the studies it examined — the kind of parasympathetic, “settle in and work” state that’s hard to get from a walk around the block. That matters more, not less, as dogs age. A peer-reviewed analysis hosted on PMC followed 804 dogs in the final quarter of their expected lifespan and found that 55% scored within normal aging, 43% showed owner-reported signs of mild cognitive impairment, and 2% showed severe impairment — a reminder that cognitive change in senior dogs sits on a spectrum most owners are already watching for, whether or not they have a name for it.

A cardboard box foraging game is a blunt instrument against that spectrum, and I won’t oversell it. But asking a dog to search, sort, and problem-solve for a reward is one of the more defensible, lowest-risk things an owner can add to a week, and it costs nothing.

Building the Box: A Foraging Game That Holds Up to a Real Dog

Start with a box slightly larger than your dog’s head, no bigger. An oversized box invites climbing in rather than nosing around, which defeats the point.

1. Strip it down. Remove all tape, staples, and plastic shipping labels. Dogster confirms these are the actual hazards, not the cardboard itself.
2. Cut nose-sized holes, not paw-sized ones, along the sides — roughly 2 to 3 inches across for a medium dog, smaller for a toy breed. The goal is scent access, not easy visual confirmation.
3. Layer in empty toilet-paper or paper-towel tubes, crimped at the ends, with a few pieces of kibble or a low-fat treat tucked inside each.
4. Crumple a few sheets of plain paper (no glossy ink, no shredded receipts) around the tubes to add texture and slow the search down.
5. Scatter a light layer of kibble loose in the bottom so there’s an easy early win — this keeps a dog, especially an older or more anxious one, from giving up in the first thirty seconds.
6. Close the box loosely or leave it open-topped for a first attempt; graduate to a taped-but-not-sealed lid once your dog has the idea.
7. Supervise the entire session. This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it toy.

Fifteen minutes is a full session for most dogs. Retire the box the moment cardboard starts coming apart in chunks rather than shredding into fibers — that’s your cue that it’s now a chew object, not a puzzle, and the risk profile has changed.

Grading the Difficulty So It Stays a Win, Not a Frustration

The point of a foraging game is a dog that keeps trying, not one that walks away. Watch the first session closely. If your dog can’t find anything in under a minute, you’ve made it too hard — go back to loose kibble in an open box. If they solve it in ten seconds flat, add tubes, add paper, close the lid partway. I tell owners to think of it less like a toy and more like a short training set: adjust the difficulty to the dog in front of you, not to the dog you remember from five years ago. An older dog with early arthritis may need the box placed flat on the floor rather than requiring a stretch or a paw-lift to reach in.

One short note worth sitting with on its own: a foraging box is not exercise, and it should never replace a walk.

What I Tell Owners Who Ask if a Supplement Could Do This Instead

This is where I get direct, because it’s the question I hear most often from owners who’ve read about NAD+ precursors or antioxidant chews and want to know if a capsule can stand in for the work above. It can’t, and the evidence explains why. Quercetin and resveratrol are two of the most talked-about antioxidant compounds in the longevity-supplement space right now, and the research behind them is real — it’s just far earlier than the marketing implies. A 2025 study on quercetin and related antioxidant compounds, published in MDPI Pharmaceuticals, tested them in a nematode (roundworm) model and found that, at the concentrations used, quercetin and unformulated Q, along with NAC and ascorbic acid, did not affect the worms’ feeding behavior. A related Phytomedicine study on resveratrol found that embryonic exposure to a resveratrol-related compound accelerated pupation and adult emergence in an insect model but shortened adult lifespan. Neither of those findings tells us what a chew does inside a fourteen-year-old Labrador. They tell us the underlying biology is being mapped, in organisms nothing like a dog, at doses and life stages nothing like a dog’s supplement regimen.

I ground my own recommendations in that gap. A supplement built around these compounds may reasonably be framed as supporting cellular health in structure-and-function terms — that’s a fair and evidence-adjacent claim — but it is not interchangeable with an intervention that has documented behavioral and welfare benefits in dogs themselves, the way scent-search enrichment does. If you want a longer breakdown of what’s proven versus promising in that category, I’ve laid out the evidence tier by tier in our Best Longevity Supplement for Senior Dogs review. The fair counterargument is that supplements and enrichment aren’t competing for the same slot in a dog’s day, and an owner short on time might reasonably prioritize the five-second capsule over the fifteen-minute box. I take that seriously — busy households are real. But I still land on doing the free, low-risk thing first, because the evidence supporting it comes from dogs, not worms.

A Dog I Still Think About

There was a fourteen-year-old mixed-breed named Juniper, about 42 pounds, whose owner brought her in mainly for a weight check. Almost as an aside, she mentioned Juniper had started sleeping through the part of the evening she used to spend patrolling the kitchen for dropped food. We talked about her joints, her diet, and — because the owner asked — whether an antioxidant chew might “wake her back up.” I was honest that the cellular-aging research behind those ingredients is promising but still mostly preclinical. What I suggested instead, alongside her existing food, was a nightly foraging box before dinner: kibble hidden in tubes, ten minutes, same time every evening. Her owner also started tucking a few blueberry pieces into the mix, which I was glad to hear, since fruit like that pulls double duty as both a low-calorie reward and a genuine source of dietary antioxidants (our piece on Can Dogs Eat Blueberries? covers the amount and prep worth knowing). Within a couple of weeks, Juniper was pacing the kitchen again at her old hour, waiting on the box instead of dropped food.

Where This Leaves an Owner Tonight

Grab a box you were going to recycle anyway. Strip the tape, cut a few holes, hide the kibble, and watch what your dog does with the first thirty seconds — that tells you more about tonight’s difficulty level than anything else in this guide. If you want variety without buying anything, rotate in soft, dog-safe fruit as the occasional jackpot find; a few banana slices tucked into the tubes work well, and our guide on Can Dogs Eat Bananas? covers safe amounts. Whatever supplement conversation you’re having with your vet can keep happening in parallel — it doesn’t have to be either-or. I’d just rather see the free, evidence-backed behavior come first, and the capsule earn its place alongside it.