Enrichment definitions cover a broad range of concepts:
- Stimulation of the senses – any, multiple, or all senses
- Expansion or broadening of types of experiences
- Opportunities to engage in instinctive, ancestral activities
- For children in school, enrichment means giving them slightly different experiences in the same subject rather than making the subject tasks more difficult to accomplish. This is similar to what enrichment means for dogs.
Why Focus on Enrichment?
Dogs seem to always be looking for ways to enrich their own lives! That’s probably your dog’s purpose in exploring various rooms of your house, poking his nose into an open drawer, examining packages when they’re delivered, and running to grab a piece of food that fell on the floor. Humans, too, look for ways to enrich our lives: shopping, taking a walk at the park, visiting museums, having a beer at a new brewery, playing a new card game at a friend’s house.
Dogs have limited opportunities to build their own enrichment schedules. After all, they can’t leave the house without your help.
But They Have Ways. . . .
Dogs can find ways to enrich their lives inside your home, and you may not like what they come up with! An available trash can provides an opportunity for seeking interesting smells and maybe even interesting tastes. Your couch or carpet may have a stimulating texture when chewed. Hearing another dog bark outside may be enriching for your dog, and he can quickly learn that “barking back” makes the other dog bark more, so the enrichment continues. These are just a few ways dogs make the most of their limited enrichment opportunities.
Where Your Dog “Came From”
Your dog evolved to search for cast-offs from human society, digging in garbage piles and seeking savory tidbits around human encampments. He did not evolve to lie on the couch and eat from a bowl, but he can be happy doing that as long as you provide plenty of stimulation to his doggie umwelt – the way he sees the world through his own doggie senses.
Enrichment Ideas to Build On
Most enrichment devices stimulate more than one of a dog’s senses, but it’s helpful to consider the senses separately first. This may inspire you to create enrichment experiences for your dog that offer the stimulation and fun that he needs.
Visual
Although a dog’s sense of smell is usually the first to come to mind, dogs are quite visual creatures. They just see things differently than humans do. They see some colors, though different and fewer ones then humans do. Colorful toys in different shapes are one type of visual stimulus that appeals to dogs. They see moving items much better than those that are still, so moving a toy around by throwing, dragging, or sliding it is great visual stimulation. Attaching the toy with a string to a stick allows you to make it “fly.” This enrichment device is often called a flirt pole.
A dog’s surrounding areas are already filled with visual stimuli, as a rule. Some homes are like mazes to dogs, with hallways and doors opening into other rooms. Furniture helps create corners where toys can hide and interesting smells can linger. Opening the door to a closet can create a wonderful enrichment experience, both visually and olfactorily. See? It’s hard to separate the stimulations to different senses! One experience can provide multi-sensory stimulation.
Auditory
Playing certain kinds of calming music for dogs has been demonstrated to increase calmness and relaxation. Playing other kinds tends to motivate energetic movement. Think Brahms vs. Metallica.
This article, Musical Dogs: A Review of the Influence of Auditory Enrichment on Canine Health and Behavior by Lindig and others, is a great one to start with if you want to know more about research on music therapy for dogs.
Many sounds are fun for dogs. Some love squeakers and bells inside toys. My Golden Retriever, Leo, really had fun with toys that “talked.” One of his favorites was a plush basketball that called out game plays when he bit it. Outdoor sounds like birds and squirrels scurrying in trees can provide the visual and auditory stimuli of a moving object as well as olfactory enrichment.
Dogs are often trained as Hearing Dogs for people with hearing loss, alerting them to various sounds as their day-to-day job. These dogs have been taught to seek the enrichment of audible stimuli by pairing them with reinforcement. This is an example of how dogs can be taught to perform enriching activities. Dogs sometimes need our help to build their skills so they can get the most out of the experiences we offer them.
Dogs hear sounds at higher frequencies than we do, so when you think your dog is alerting to “nothing,” you’re wrong! You just can’t hear it. It sounds like silence to you, but it’s audible to them. This is the message behind both using “silent dog whistles” and dogs alerting to “ghosts” in your home. Most likely, an electronic item is emitting a high-frequency sound that you can’t hear. Could be enriching, could be annoying to him, but your dog is not crazy! Eileen Anderson, award-winning author, trainer, musician, and engineer explains the impacts of sounds you can’t hear but your dog can in this article about “Ultrasound” in your home.
Olfactory
It is well known that dogs have a highly developed sense of smell but not everyone considers how access to odors can be used for enrichment. Something as simple as a teabag, placed in a container, can help you teach your dog to search for interesting smells. Reinforce the behavior of sniffing the container and you’ll also be associating that particular odor with good feelings. Increase the difficulty of finding the odor bit by bit while reinforcing the smell every time, and your dog will learn to find that odor among all the others available. This is another example of using training to create an enriching experience for a dog.
Olfactory enrichment is easy to create. A plastic food storage container with holes poked in the lid can hold the odor of fresh herbs like lavender or parsley. A piece of PVC pipe can hold a few drops of essential oil inside. A box that has been out in the yard, handled by a new person, or played with by a cat or dog can be a great olfactory stimulator. Even going to visit a friend who has dogs or cats and coming home to let your dog smell your shoes is enriching!
New locations are filled with new smells. If you don’t have access to a new, safely fenced area, Sniffspot is helpful. You can rent a dog yard for an hour and let your dog sniff and enjoy exercise along with stimulation for all his senses. Pay attention to what your dog enjoys sniffing and use that for enrichment, along with new smells.
Tactile
How things feel in a dog’s mouth, against his body, and under his feet, provide sense-broadening experiences. Providing toys of different textures and sizes is an easy way to provide this experience. Big toys, small toys, latex, rubber, rope, and cloth toys, all feel different in your dog’s mouth and require different techniques for him to pick them up.
Your home contains surfaces of different textures to walk on, and you can help your dog explore new surfaces to walk on when you go places. Hanging a piece of fabric or paper to push past or through can be fun for some dogs, as can moving through tall grass or shrubs.
Digging in the dirt is an ancestral joy for most dogs. You can keep your yard intact by providing an assigned digging area and burying toys and chews in it to encourage your dog’s instinctive seeking behavior. Swimming fits into the category of tactile enrichment, as your dog’s body glides through the water. Rolling in the grass may be the easiest tactile enrichment opportunity you can provide for your dog.
Taste
Food puzzles are probably the easiest way to provide enrichment, because dogs love to eat and they must do so regularly. It’s so handy to have stuffed Kongs and Lick-mats in the freezer, ready to use when you need them! You can buy many kinds of dog puzzles to stuff with food. The types of household items you can create food puzzles from are endless. Food puzzles reinforce the behaviors your dog uses to seek tasty treasures. They also provide opportunities to express his instinctive seeking behaviors. Provide your dog with all the different taste experiences you can come up with, of course ensuring that the foods you choose are safe for him.
Other Benefits of Enrichment Opportunities
Seeking
I’ve used the word “seeking” several times here already and that’s for good reason! Jaak Panksepp studied and developed theories around the motivations of animals based on their evolutionary niches; humans, too. “Seeking” is one theoretical system that makes sense in terms of why humans and animals alike appear to enjoy puzzles, exploration, and experimentation. Anticipating what will be discovered may be an important driver of behavioral choices, but just seeking, in itself, appears to be key.
This is a pretty deep topic, and fascinating! It’s a whole new way of observing what animals are doing. Check out this article if you want to know more about it. You don’t have to read the article to consider “seeking” as you prepare enrichment experiences and devices for your dog! Many enrichment activities already employ “seeking” in their design.
Contrafreeloading
“Contrafreeloading” is when an animal makes the choice to work to get food, even when there may be a bowl of food available that requires no work. Get it? Contra = “the opposite”. Freeloading = “you don’t have to do anything to get the food.” So contrafreeloading means “you have to do something to get the food.”
Consider how enrichment is used for wild animals confined in zoos and safari parks. These animals have little to no connection with their ancestral environments and lifestyles, and enrichment provides ways to activate parts of their brains that could deteriorate without that stimulation. Enrichment allows animals to behave in the ways they evolved to behave.
In zoos, lions attack and “kill” meat on the bone, frozen and hanging from a tree. Servals run through artificial tunnels to find food at the end. Meerkats explore tunnel systems that mimic the way they lived in the wild. Giraffes are given their leafy treats from high platforms to mimic how they evolved to grasp and pull leaves from tall trees.
Your dog craves seeking and contrafreeloading. Give him opportunities and watch him make the most of them.
Social Enrichment
Dogs can certainly benefit from playing with other dogs, but this requires a little more from their parents. Dogs need your help for proper introductions to other dogs. It’s your job to provide safety and good associations when dogs spend time together. Even dogs who live together require your supervision to ensure solid relationships. With proper preparation and precautions, social enrichment can be a joy for your dog.
Enrichment for Your Dog Makes Your Life Easier
Providing an enrichment experience that your dog really gets into can make stressful times easier for both of you to cope with. The purpose of enrichment is not to distract your dog from what’s going on. By providing enrichment during times of stress, you’ll teach him to cope better. Your dog will make positive associations between the potentially negative environment or event and the good feelings that occur when he’s delving into his enrichment. Association, or classical conditioning, is powerful learning.
During long car rides, when dogs are home alone all day, and when they have to be confined are times when enrichment can help dogs feel better about their situations. This also helps their parents feel better, knowing dogs have something to do that is teaching them good habits and enriching their lives.
A Recent Experience for Daisy and Albert
We recently had workers in the yard, building a catio for our cats. I’ve written before about Daisy and her propensity to bark threateningly at “intruders.” We use a variety of techniques to help her change that behavior and it’s decreasing. She can now divide her attention between whatever “threatening” thing is going on and my guidance.
Now that she’s able to turn her attention toward me, away from things going on outside, I can introduce an enrichment device. This is an opportunity for Daisy to develop good associations between “intruders” in the yard and a yummy puzzle that triggers her “seeking” system. For Albert, it helps maintain his already-good associations with workers.
At times like this, I usually use stuffed Kongs and Lick-mats. They give me an extended period of time during which the dogs are focused on them. Daisy likes them enough to choose to fully focus on the puzzles even while the noise of the workers is going on outside. The other day, through the use of a stuffed Kong and some short and simple training sessions, we got through a full day’s work with only a few low-volume “woofs” and no extended barking! The dogs even had naptime while the workers were here. I was thrilled!
Enrichment is a Learning Opportunity
Enrichment is not distraction. Well, it may be partially, but the stress-reduction and learning factors – both the consequences of a dog’s choices of action and associations between good feelings and potentially stressful situations – are much more impactful, long-lasting learning.
Dogs make behavioral choices all the time. It’s helpful when those choices are beneficial to the behavioral repertoires they choose from and also make things a little easier for their parents.
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