These 7 enrichment tips don’t require buying expensive equipment or spending hours of your day to do.
1) Hide your dog’s daily food instead of putting it in a bowl
You can place raw food in small containers or on pieces of cardboard.
2) DIY versions of sport
Agility can be replicated on your walks in the form of jumping over and running around obstacles; all you need to do for man trailing is ask someone to hide! When your dog understands context, you can add cues to tell your dog what you’re going to do.
3) ‘Boil the kettle’ training’
A full kettle can take 2-3 minutes to boil. Use this time to work on something – a trick or a functional behaviour. If you make 5 hot drinks a day, that’s about 15 minutes’ worth of training!
4) Ten minutes of tug
Cooperative play is knackering for a dog – if you work from home and only have 10 mins in between calls, I guarantee a decent game will tire your dog more than a 30 min march round the block. If your dog cannot yet play cooperatively, improving that is in itself tiring.
5) Nosework!
Once you know what to do, detection specifically is not only very easy to do anywhere but also requires hardly any equipment. It’s incredibly mentally stimulating (and therefore tiring); 2 or 3 decent searches sends my dogs to sleep.
6) Shape a random behaviour
Shaping is tiring for a dog – it’s different to luring because it involves the dog having to solve problems with less guidance from you. I like to select a random item the dog can interact with such as hold or climb in/on, have a secret end goal in mind and see what the dog offers! I reward behaviours as the dog approximates closer & closer to my end goal; for example, when I was teaching Nina ‘box’ (put your front paws on a horizontal object), I rewarded when she put one paw on because it was on the way to my end goal.
7) Prepare food enrichment in advance
We don’t believe a Kong can replace breed-specific fulfilment or exercise, but sometimes taking 5-10 minutes to do something ahead of needing it can make a difference. There are lots of food enrichment recipes online; otherwise you can use their food. Freeze with water so it lasts longer.
