Background:
If you have a pet, it’s probably overweight.
Sorry to have to break the news to you this way.
Your cat / dog / snake / whatever probably does not get enough exercise, and you most likely compound the problem by over-feeding it.
Fig 1: In the wild, food isn’t found in conveniently-labeled bowls that don’t fight back!
The proposal:
Luckily, there is a solution: instead of just allowing your pet to eat in peace, make it earn its meal by eating out of a special motorized food bowl that constantly tries to escape.
(The “minimum viable product” version of this concept is just a pet bowl superglued onto a Roomba vacuum.)
More complex versions might include a food bowl on a remote-controlled toy car, a food bowl on spider-like appendages (see Fig. 2), or even a quad-copter drone with attached food bowl (see Fig. 3).
By using this type of food bowl, two requirements can be met simultaneously:
* Your pet gets some additional exercise.
* Your pet’s hunting instinct is satisfied. This is the same principle involved in chasing a laser pointer.
Fig 2: A food bowl could be placed on motorized robotic legs, possibly with wheels on the bottom, to allow the bowl to make a quick getaway in any terrain.
Fig 3: The quadcopter variant opens up additional options for pet-food-acquisition difficulty, but may be difficult in a normal sized house. Beware of using this with pet birds, as contact with rotors may not be beneficial to avian physiology.
PROS: Your pet can become the apex predator that it was destined to be.
CONS: If your pet becomes too skilled, it may supplant you as ruler of the home, eventually leading to the same “Planet of the Apes” scenario seen in the “train your pet to bite you if you procrastinate” idea.
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 
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