What is Enrichment?

The concept of enrichment first arose as a method to help make the lives of captive animals more like what they would normally experience in nature. So, for example, animals that would normally forage for their food would have their meals hidden around their enclosures in areas that would be similar to what they might expect to find in the wild, as opposed to just having it laid out in a dish on the floor.

Already, you can probably see one very straightforward, but powerful, application of enrichment. But other than that example, what is enrichment? And how can we utilize its concepts to help our training projects?

Some Basics                                              

As it pertains to training, enrichment is basically a way for us to provide our pet animals (any species, really, but I’ll stick mostly to dogs) ways to express their natural tendencies in day-to-day life. We determine what their “natural tendencies” are by looking at feral or closely-related wild populations.

By doing this with cats, for example, we find that they delineate their territories by marking certain objects both visually and with smell. And so we provide our house cats with scratching posts so that they can express this natural tendency in a way that doesn’t destroy our homes. And so on.

With dogs we find that they like to sniff around as a way to forage or scavenge for food, or as a way to establish what other dogs have been through their area recently, and so on. We may also find, as a downstream effect of all this sniffing, that they scratch around or dig to help expose a smell that they might be tracking, or that they tend to prefer certain areas that smell familiar to them and, hence, mark those areas with their own smells to establish a sense of security.

These examples, of course, only scratch the surface (ha!) of the wide range of behaviors that our pets display that are related to their natural tendencies.

Some Training Applications

So now, hopefully, we’ve answered the question, “what is enrichment?” and can discuss some applications for its use in training. Many “problem behaviors” can stem from our pets’ lack of opportunity to express their natural tendencies.

Since we’ve touched upon our dogs’ keen sense of smell and how it informs their behaviors, we’ll follow that line a bit more. To me, sniffing for a dog is somewhat analogous to reading for a human. On the surface, it doesn’t appear to be all that strenuous or physically stimulating, but it can have great mental benefits, as well as being plenty tiring if done for long enough.

We already mentioned one of the more obvious applications for enrichment: giving our pets opportunities to work for their food more, rather than just eating it out of a bowl day after day. This can be achieved with any variety of puzzle or snuffle feeders, or just by scattering their food around. The main idea here is just to engage their sense of smell and allow them to use it somewhat like they might do to track down a meal in the wild. A quick and easy addition to this is to provide some variety in their foods as a bit of incentive.

Some other easy applications to engage your dog’s nose is to slow down your walks and allow them some time to just sniff around. This is something like allowing them to browse social media, see who’s been out and about, and get a rough gauge for how they’re doing. Again, while not that physically stimulating, this is great mental exercise for your dog and can help to fulfill some of their social needs.

Conclusion

The important part of this blog to keep in mind is basically that by providing appropriate ways for our pets to express their natural tendencies, we can oftentimes lessen or altogether avoid certain problem behaviors.

Animals who are reactive or undersocialized can still have fulfilling lives while their social behaviors are being improved; animals who are acting out due to boredom or frustration can channel their energies into something more appropriate; and so on.

So, what is enrichment? It’s a way for us to allow our pets to be their natural selves in a human-centric world. To retain their dogginess or catness or general animalness, and by doing so, forego some of the behavior issues that can arise out of a lack of being able to express who they are.

For more specific information on how to utilize enrichment in your pet’s training, contact me!

And for more information on enrichment in general, check out Canine Enrichment for the Real World.