Review of LickiMat

The highlights: 

What is it?: This is a rubber mat with a pattern on the base – I have the one with squares along it – so that you can scrape a paste into the mat and it will keep your dog busy as they try and lick it all out. Looking at the promotional video, you can also get this for your cat…not that I have a cat, so I can’t review what a cat thinks of this, but it might be worth reading on to see if you think your cat would enjoy this!

Does it work?: Yes

Would I buy it again?: Yes

Other options?: Lots of different brands do these types of licking mats – just a quick search on Amazon brings up the options. LickiMat is the brand name for this product, but licky mats aren’t, so you can search more generally using that too.

Where to buy:  The one I got is from the brand ‘LickiMat’ and I have the classic design which is just basic squares – you can find this on Amazon.

It would be really lovely (if you like this post and want to receive updates on future posts) if you could subscribe - it's so nice to have you here, and I would be super happy to have you come back in the future! Anyway, on to the LickiMat review...

I love Obi dog, but on an evening I wish he’d give me a break...If you want to jump straight to the section below for the LickiMat review, click here.

If you want to hear about more about how Obi drives me crazy, and the things that I have done to try and address it (some more successfully than others!), then please read on.

So, let me explain…here’s a typical day of life with Obi…

We get up around 5.30 or 6am, he gets breakfast while I follow my morning coffee ritual and plan my day of studying. (Side note - I have a print out designed for this which I put together to create the most productive way of organising my day, having watched countless videos on productive working etc – I will be adding a post about the daily planner I designed and other productivity tips that work for me in the upcoming weeks, so do subscribe if you want to be notified about that!)

It’s then shower time (for me, not Obi) and once I'm all dressed (an important step before leaving the house!) we then go out for our morning walk. On arriving home after our walk, I study. Obi sleeps. Then, like clockwork at around 10am, the once sleeping Obi wakes up and starts stretching – it’s time for our second walk of the day. Once back home, he’s fast asleep (again) on his bed beside my desk, while I study until lunchtime.

When I stop for lunch he will lazily (and with great amounts of effort often accompanied by a little grumble) shift from the bed near my desk, to the one near where I have lunch, where he will sleep for another 45 minutes while I have lunch. As soon as I have finished lunch, he’s suddenly awake and waiting for his lunchtime snack. He gets some sort of human food at this point – generally, I give him beef or chicken which has been slow cooked in water – I know this sounds like he’s being spoiled, but it’s only so I can hide his daily arthritis pill in there! Plus, it’s not fancy meat. The beef is the Tesco frozen beef that has bad reviews from humans, but Obi enjoys it! I do sometimes have to cut the fat off though, as too much fat can give him the poops, and then I have to give him something for his tummy - Pro-Kolin. I will be reviewing that product in due course, so please do subscribe if this is a familiar thing for your pup! So, I put the cook from frozen beef chunks in the small slow cooker (which is designed for 1 - 2 people at around 1.5 - 1.8 litres and which was a gift, so I am not sure of the brand, but is about the same size as this one), with just plain water, which means that the meat breaks apart really easily and all the little beef or chicken bits are them mixed in with the water, so one pot will do a few days at a time.  

After lunch, we go for walk number 3, before coming back and he spends the afternoon snoozing again while I study. At 5, we shut down for the day and he gets his evening meal, which he usually sniffs at, has a mouthful of, and then decides that his time is better spent snoozing while I cook dinner.

After dinner, he is up again expecting his leftovers, and he might get a scrambled egg or some rice or some more of his meat in water mixture before going back to eat a bit more of his dog food. Then, he is awake! And I mean wide awake! He will then bark at me every 5 minutes to go outside, and he will go stand outside, sniff the air for about 30 seconds, before deciding he doesn’t need a wee, and would rather be inside. So, we go back inside, I sit down on the sofa, press play on my paused programme, and he’s back, barking at me again. He wants more dinner! Or another wee, which turns out not to be a wee but just an opportunity to stand outside sniffing the air for about a minutes before heading back inside. So, it appears, it is just an excuse to interrupt the one time in the day when I am actually relaxing! This escapade goes on for 2 hours, until he decides it’s too much like hard work, and he’ll finally settle down at about 8pm. At 8.30pm, I wake him up to go for his evening wee and poop, before we head up to bed, where he will curl up on his bed upstairs and – you’ve guessed it – sleep while I read on my Perlego app for half an hour or so (again, review of that coming soon, so if that interests you, you can subscribe to this blog so you are kept in the loop) before turning off the lights and (hopefully) sleeping through the night without being woken up by Obi for another toilet break! This then gets repeated the next day, and this is our life! Aside from Sundays, when I try to have a day where I don’t study, this is how our week goes.

As you can see, he’s a real gem all day and the world’s laziest dog as he actually sleeps about 20 hours of the day, until it’s time for me to relax, then spends 2 of his awake hours driving me crazy as he has me up and down like a yo-yo! So, like I said, I love him – a lot! BUT I got to a point where I was like – Enough! I want to chill out! So, I decided to try and find things that would allow me to have just an hour of down time, while Obi is occupied. I did try some of the brain training toys, but because Obi is such a big breed, and now has arthritis, it’s not great for him to be stood up and bending all the way to the floor to reach those toys, so I only now play those with him if I hold it up off the floor for him. He also gets a little frustrated with those and ends up smacking them with his paw, which means he smacks me with his paw as I’m holding it at head height for him – not the best set-up for trying to relax at the end of a long day!

I also play “find it” with him, which he really loves, but that generally gets him very excited, so isn’t always the best at the end of the day. If you have never played “find it” you should give it a go! Basically, you hide treats in a room, and then your dog has to hunt them out using their sniffers. You can use any treats, but I find the most effective are the really strong-smelling treats, like Bakers Whirlers, Sizzlers which both smell very strongly of bacon, or the Allsorts, which also smell very strongly of meat, but are a little harder to break up into smaller pieces! So, to set up the game, I put Obi in the hallway and close the living room door so I can hide the treats – he doesn’t like that and often has a little whine, but it’s not for long! Once all the treats are hidden around the room, I open the door and say “find it” and he runs around the room like a maniac sniffing out the treats! He loves this game, and it does make him tired, but only after he’s got over the excitement! Sometimes he gets so excited, that after one game he barks for another, and another, and another, so it’s not really a “wind down at the end of the day” kind of game! Here’s Obi playing “find it”:

So, if I do play “find it” with him, I will always follow it up with a cuddle or a more relaxed game, like his LickiMat. This is Obi about 15-20 minutes after playing "find it":

I also have a treat ball, which Obi also really enjoys (although not as much as “find it”), and I will be reviewing that soon, so do subscribe if you want to find out about that. I also bought some things to have a go at making my own snuffle mat (which you hide treats in for your dog to sniff out), to see if that works, so again, you can subscribe to be kept in the loop! Also I have just noticed that the Emmi-Pet toothbrush is in the background of this photo too - again, I am in the process of testing that, so do subscribe if you want to know how that goes!

Finally, I have this LickiMat.

The LickiMat is made of soft rubber (that sort of reminds me of silicone) and it is dishwasher safe, but you can also handwash it.

That said, because it is designed to make getting food out of the squares and shapes of the rubber difficult for your dog, it is quite difficult to clean - as you can see from this picture after Obi has licked as much peanut butter out as he can! So you may have to soak it before putting it in the dishwasher, or hand washing it. I don't need to soak this for my dishwasher, but my dishwasher is pretty amazing (again, I will be reviewing that in due course, so feel free to subscribe to be kept in the loop there!)

I guess that if you buy one and it works for you and your pup, you could always get a second one so that you have one “in use” while the other one is being cleaned. You can get the LickiMat in different designs, and in different colours, but they all have in common that the rubber has parts of the design which are higher than others. This means that you can rub anything that is dog safe and paste-like into the LickiMat so it all gets stuck in the joins, corners and crevices. I have the classic one which is just squares.

Your pup (or cat) will then sit and lick at it for a decent chunk of time, focussing on the yummy taste and the need to get all of that yummy-ness out of the bumps, corners, sides, joins and crevices.

Here's me prepping the LickiMat with the Peamutt Butter I use, plus Obi very obediently going to his bed before he can have it!

I use dog safe Peamutt Butter, but anything which is a paste or cream like texture will do, so you can use dog pâté or pastes, Kong Easy Treat Dog Paste, or any other dog safe paste like substance that will get between all of the raised and lowered parts of this mat! The makers of LickiMat say that you can use wet or raw food, canned food, doggie ice cream, kibble and soaked kibble. It is not a chew toy though, so if your dog is a big chewer, this may not be the best for you. That said, they do make another one which they say is better for chewers and can be put in the freezer! I haven’t tried that one, so can’t attest to how robust it is, but here’s the link to that one if you want to check it out. That said, you shouldn’t leave your pup unsupervised when using this LickiMat, just in case they chew through it. I pop the LickiMat in front of Obi as he’s on his bed and he licks away while I get some peace and quiet!

You could also use a Kong - they are more robust and you can stuff them with all sorts - I usually put the Peamutt Butter in these and then add some treats which stick to the Kong. Obi then flings it around and the treats come flying out, or he also sits and licks at it. I use the Kong less now that he is older (although it looks like Kong do one for senior dogs, which I didn't realise before), but when I first got him at 7 years old, he loved the Kong toys! Just don't fill them with smashed sweet potato - unless, of course, you want this all over the walls - lesson learned there! I also have the Kong bone, which they have changed the design of slightly since I bought mine, but I just add Peamutt Butter to the holes in the bone and he will sit and lick at that for a while too!

For the Lickimat, I spread dog safe Peamutt Butter into one corner of the LickiMat for Obi to lick at. On a side note, you can't use human peanut butter for dogs - it contains a sweetener that is toxic to pups! The LickiMat keeps him occupied for anything from 15-30 minutes depending on how much Peamutt Butter I use and how far I spread it out. I never fill the whole LickiMat because I think that might be too much of peanut butter all at once, but you could use the whole LickiMat surface if you decide to try this to feed your dog their actual dog food for sure!

The description also says that the LickiMat is vet and trainer approved, and can help promote dental health by encouraging saliva production. It says that it helps soothe anxiety and boredom. I am not sure about the anxiety side of things, as I have never tested this, but I think it definitely helps with boredom and because he has to focus on it for a while, I think it tires him out too! As soon as Obi is finished with his licking extravaganza, he jumps up, goes for a drink of water, barks for a wee, then comes back in and settles down on his bed. So, it must do something to help, otherwise he would still be getting me up and down like a yo-yo!

I hope you found this review helpful! If you did, please subscribe to be kept in the future blog posts loop.

with love

Rebecca

xxx

P.S. Please note that this blog may contain affiliate links (including those to Amazon). When you click on the link and purchase the product, I receive a small commission.