What are dog enrichment activities?
Dog enrichment activities are games you can use to help keep your pup busy mentally. They can also be a form of exercise for your dog. Despite their popularity, somehow, we’ve escaped knowing about these games up to this point.
We have active, high drive dogs in our family. If you have active dogs, you know how hard it is for them to stay inside when they haven’t run off their energy. Fortunately for us, it doesn’t happen very often. Our dogs get lots of physical activity. But what about mental exercise?
Is it possible that Quinn will actually learn to chill out sometimes? What about Lincoln? Could it be that he will be less reactive if he is exercising his brain? It sounds like I need to find out more.
Why is mental stimulation important?
I have to admit that we’ve fallen short in this area. We have been making sure that Quinn gets to play ball and run several times a day. And Lincoln gets as much running in as he seems to need. But is it enough?
It turns out that mental exercise is also important for our dogs to be calm and happy. An intelligent dog wants to use his or her brain, and we can help. I’ve been talking to trainers and other dog professionals who recommend mental stimulation as part of our dog’s overall fitness program.
Since we have intelligent breeds who have been bred and raised to use their brains, it’s even more important. The trainers say that our dogs WANT a job, and using their brains helps them feel useful. We can start with dog enrichment activities like:
Playing hide and seek with treats,
Finding certain scents, and
Giving meals using food puzzles.
How do we get started?
What other games can we play with our dogs? Not knowing anything about getting started with dog enrichment activities, I started looking online. Here are a few of the sites I found that have some suggestions.
In addition, one of the trainers we’ve been working with recently suggested several activities to help work those brains.
As we’ve been learning more about helping our high-energy Aussies and Lincoln, our special guy, I’ve been learning more about mental stimulation and how that helps with the overall fitness of your dog.
We’ve started experimenting with a few things lately. We’ll see how it goes. Read more about our experiences with Lincoln and our other dogs here.
What dog enrichment activities do you do with your dogs? Do they help your dogs?
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