The proper definition of enrichment is: meeting all of an animal’s mental, physical, and emotional needs in order to empower them to perform species-typical behaviors in healthy, safe, and appropriate ways.
Simply put this means it is our responsibility to meet all of our dogs' needs. To ensure they are healthy, clean, fed appropriately and receiving sufficient exercise. All sounds pretty simple so far?
Encouraging your dog to use their brain is also an important part of enrichment.
It challenges your dog's ability to think, learn, and remember. It also provides opportunities for them to carry out behaviours that come naturally to them, certain behaviours are built into our dogs DNA and having opportunities to fulfill those needs such as sniffing, chewing or digging is important for your dogs mental wellbeing.
Remember lockdown? Limited to 1 hour of exercise a day, stuck in your own house or garden, no free access to your peers or friends.
Now imagine you didn't have the internet during that time, no phone, tv, laptop or even a book. Just you, your four walls and your garden.
How long would it have taken before you were shouting at people over the garden wall, or through the living room window? Pacing the house looking for something to do? Bored, grumpy and fed up. I would imagine it would affect your mental health too.
Now think about that in terms of your dog, what we have just described is how some dogs live their whole lives. Walked on our schedule. Quick game of ball at the park, quick tour around the streets for toilets and back home to stare at the walls. They don't even have supermarket queue to go stand in, or bread to bake!
Many dogs were bred to do a specific job, and are hard wired to dig, hunt, protect or herd for example and doing so brings them huge amounts of joy and job satisfaction. Sitting on the sofa does not come naturally to most dogs. Even our smaller companion breeds can benefit from daily enrichment.
There are lots of expensive toys on the market designed to help enrich our dogs lives…puzzle toys and toys to stuff with food. And whilst these toys are a great start, and I myself own a good variety of them, we don't need to stop there.
There are many less expensive (or even free) ways of providing our dogs enrichment. For example opportunities to work, problem solve, sniff, dig, hunt, climb or swim. The more we can open up their world the more opportunities we have to enrich their lives!
So how do we figure out what our dogs find enriching?
Remember all dogs are different, and what is fun and satisfying for one, may be old hat to another, so think about what your dog loves to do, or what they were bred for.
When left to their own devices, what would your dog choose to do? That's probably a good clue to what they are craving.
Do they dig in the garden? A sandpit filled with sand or a pile of leaves, and a few toys or treats hidden at the bottom would be a fantastic substitute for this. You could even teach them to go and search it on cue!
Do they love to Jump and Climb on things they shouldn't? Teach your dogs to climb, balance or crawl on things on cue…find fallen trees, park benches or other fun things to investigate together on walks, have fun learning how best to balance and bounce off things you find.
Do they love to steal your socks, carry sticks on walks? Teach them to retrieve items around the house in exchange for treats. Set them up a box and teach them to collect each of their toys, and put them back in the box. You can level this one up by hiding tennis balls or toys around the house/garden and asking them to go and find them for you - getting a dog's nose involved is always a winner! Take some of those toys out with you on a walk, hide them in some long grass, or in a woodland, and send them in to find them and then encourage them to bring them back to you one at a time.
Do they love to sniff everything when outside on walks? Teach them to search on cue - Start by throwing treats into some long grass and asking them to ‘go find’. Gradually reduce the amount of treats in the search area, so that their noses are having to work even harder to find the food. Slowly increase the difficulty of the hiding places for the treats, under cones/chairs, in low tree branches, wedged in fence panels so that they have to work hard to find them. Foraging for food is a basic need in every dog, any animal in the wild would spend most of its day foraging for food.
Do they love to chase….everything! A flirt pole, or long chaser-type tug toy allows you to drag the toy quickly across the floor to simulate the chase and then play tug once they have caught it. 10 Mins in the garden with a flirt pole is a great way to satisfy your dog's chase needs…just be careful not to go too far the other way….these toys are very exciting, and it's easy to get our dogs over-stimulated.
End the session with a long lasting chew, or a likki mat to simulate the end of the ‘hunt’ and help calm things back down.
Do they love to learn? Teaching your dogs some cool tricks is a fantastic way to work their clever minds. Teach them to roll over, weave between your legs, speak, jump through hoops, sit pretty…the possibilities are endless. A few short sessions a day will keep most dogs happy and fulfilled.
For those that love ‘MORE’ - Some dogs love to be busy and would work for hours every day happily. DOG SPORTS are a great way to meet the needs of these types of dogs if you don't plan to work your worker.
Dog sports have a huge list of benefits, aside from the obvious - an opportunity to burn off excess energy and the fantastic brain workout. They also...
Build confidence.
Improve your relationship with your dog.
Encourage your dog's independence.
Improve yours and your dog's ability to communicate with each other.
Develop problem solving skills
Learning to have fun together - the more engaging you can be, the more your dog will want to hang out with you outside the house!
At Pawsome Manners we offer a Beyond the Basics class - where we focus on learning skills and games that your dog will find enriching and fulfilling, skills that you can take home, and use everyday to keep your dog happy and busy!
We also offer the amazing dog sport Dog Parkour. These classes combine brain training with teaching your dogs some amazing physical skills like balancing on beams or moving objects, climbing up, crawling through, or jumping over everyday items. It's a non competitive sport designed to add enrichment and opportunities for you and your dog to engage with the environment on your everyday walks.
If you’d like to know more about our classes, here is a link to our class info:
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