Canine enrichment

PART 1

TEXT: SARAH WANLESS

Canine Enrichment refers to any activity that engages your dog’s innate behaviours, such as digging, sniffing, chewing, and licking. In other words, it provides an outlet for the expression of species appropriate behaviours and is essential for creating healthy, happy, well-behaved dogs. Enrichment helps you to find ways of allowing your dog to engage in natural activities or behaviours that we often suppress, such as digging or chewing, but in a positive manner that we can wholeheartedly encourage.

WHY ENRICHMENT?

While it goes without saying that is important to physically exercise our dogs, there are many other elements of dog care that are just as important but get sidelined, such as sensory or cognitive enrichment activities. Just like us, dogs need a variety of interesting, appropriate, and challenging activities to keep them happy, while also leaving them physically, emotionally, and mentally satisfied. Enrichment activities can often tire them out more than a 5km run!

DIFFERENT TYPES OF ENRICHMENT

There are a whole range of different types of enrichment we can provide for our furry friends, and they can be categorised into the following groups: social, cognitive, sensory, physical, food-based, and toy-based. You’ll often find that one particular activity will span several categories.

We strongly recommend doing some research on your particular dog’s breed or breeds, as understanding their breed purpose will help you to know what enrichment activities would work best for them. For example, a herding ball for your Border Collie, digging experiences for your Jack Russell and playing fetch (retrieving) with your Retriever, would all be highly beneficial.

THE BENEFITS OF ENRICHMENT

Enrichment activities have a multitude of benefits for your dog and can help reduce frustration, boredom and the occurrence of unwanted behaviors. These activities have also been proven through research to improve your dog’s overall well-being, and, of course, any activity that involves spending time with your pup will naturally strengthen your bond.

THIS SERIES

Here at DQ, we are committed to improving the well-being of our dogs so we will be providing monthly enrichment ideas (from all categories) for your pup. Ranging from the expensive to the (virtually) free, from store-bought to homemade, we’ll make it easy for you to incorporate enrichment activities into your pups’ daily lives.

DID YOU KNOW?

The part of a dog's brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is about 40 times greater than ours.

Mats shown here are by Snuffling Tazz!

1. THE SNUFFLE MAT

To kick things off, we’re introducing you to the Snuffle Mat. A Snuffle Mat is a cognitive, sensory, and food-based form of enrichment that involves a mat, often with a rubber base, and fabric strips that are knotted through the holes. While it sounds (and often looks) a little strange, it’s what’s inside that really counts. All these loose pieces of fabric provide a plethora of places to hide treats (and even kibble) and your dog will love sniffing them all out!

We would recommend starting with higher value, tasty, good smelling treats for the first few tries while your dog is learning what the mat is all about. You can then gradually transition to lower value treats, or even ditch their dinner bowl entirely and feed them full meals in the mat, once they have the drive to work for it.

This type of enrichment is classified as sensory, as it’s all about the nose. A dog’s sense of smell is his most important sense. Dogs prefer to smell to investigate, so it’s easy to understand why a snuffle mat would be such a beneficial enrichment activity for him. These mats are incredibly satisfying for your pooch (think about the mental boost they receive when they snuffle out a delicious goodie) and allow your dog to participate in scent work and scavenging behaviors.

It is important to remove the mat when your pup has found all the treats (give it a good shake when you think they’re done to get rid of any of the well-hidden ones). This is important as it signifies the “end” of the activity, which is key. We also don’t recommend leaving the mat lying around when not in use, as the fabric will start smelling like treats and dogs may chew and potentially ingest the fabric.

Snuffle Mats are now widely available, but we’ve had great experiences with mats from Snuffling Tazz and Groot Poort Clothing Co. We love their homemade, custom designs, patterns, sizes and colours. Check them out today!