We'll Call it Enrichment!

This blog post has been a long time in the making - not because I labored over it by any means, but because I've been collecting little ideas here and there for a while as they came to me or as daily life offered up a new list item!

Practically anyone who knows me or has worked with me knows I love enrichment and my doggos, Ruby and June, are not at all opposed to being my test subjects when I want to try something new. But there are times I come across something that I didn't plan; daily life sometimes just offers up something a little different, and my response is often to shrug and say, "We'll call it enrichment!" So, below is a list of the random, accidental enrichment we stumbled across in our daily life with dogs!

• Digging for the outside toy crate that's been buried in the snow or a leaf pile

• Snuffling and digging out treats or kibble that fell between the dog bed and the wall (because my aim is really not great)

• Laying out an area rug a friend gave us (they have cats and a dog in their household) for sniffing and exploring

• Letting the doggos sniff at the armchair we bought on Facebook Marketplace and that we found out came from a household with two dogs

• Giving the doggos their fill of sniffs on me, my bag, my clothes, etc. after a day of visiting clients and other dogs

• When I fill a food toy and spill or drop food on the floor, I leave it for them to find and clean up like a scatter feeding or foraging opportunity (I always say that I have two dogs and shouldn't have to clean things up off the floor....and I don't really have to pick many things up!).

• When we get home from grocery shopping, we set the bags down on the floor for the girls to sniff through and inspect (we call it "shopping"); often, we also invite them to "help us bring stuff in," which mostly looks like them going to the car to inspect the open trunk and trot back in the house with us.

• Toy swap! We don't keep all of their toys out all of the time; a decent chunk of them are held in reserve in a storage bin or in the closet and, about every month, we dump the toys out on the floor for them to pick through and select the ones they want to play with for the next few weeks.

• June frequently brings a food toy onto the couch (to push off the edge - something our hardwood floors LOVE - or to "show us" what toy she's playing with), so pieces of kibble often spill out of the toys onto the couch and blankets; both girls can spend minutes snuffling and digging the kibble pieces out from between the cushions and the folds of the blankets.

• June found a small piece of a wrapper from something that we left behind during cleanup, so we practiced a "real-life" Drop It (this is a specific example, but is a scenario that plays out often with a curious and smart doggo who knows how to game the system!).

• Taste tests! It might be kind of silly, but it's fun for me! When we get new bags of food, I often set out a piece of each of the old/familiar kibble and from the new bags of food to see which they eat first and if they prefer one over the other of the new kibble flavors/brands. I usually repeat this a few times because science.

• We have introduced a few new "Recall" cues over the years, such as a random whistle that I happen to be able to do (I'm not the best at whistling). Most notably, my girls know a "whoops" cue, which means they should come check the kitchen floor because I, apparently, am kind of clumsy in the kitchen and drop things on the floor quite a lot.

• Snow ball "fights" (tossing snow balls for the girls to catch or chase)

• When we get a delivery of something big and the box is big enough for the girls to get into, we'll often play around with asking them to hop in, sit in it, lay down in it, jump over it, etc.!

• Taking them in the car to get coffee, pick up groceries, get gas, pick something up from a family member or drop something off with them, etc. - weather permitting, especially with the windows cracked!

• Finding and chewing on the giant leaf stem someone brought in the house on their shoe

• Digging out a nylabone/benebone that's stuck to the underside of a faux sherpa blanket on the couch (if you know, you know)

• June loves searching the yard in the Spring for dead worms to roll in (and maybe snack on if we're in the mood - dogs are gross sometimes)! She's recently expanded to slugs, as well, which is just SO fun.

• We sometimes ask for "help" from the girls in collecting sticks from the yard for a bonfire or to remove with the yard waste (Ruby, though, usually sees this as her humans putting together a buffet of sticks that need to be made smaller, so she'll select her favorites to pull out and enjoy.)

• Bobbing for treats in the water bowl when the clumsy human drops a couple in it

• Licking off the rubber scraper while baking with the pawrents

• Watching a spider on the ceiling...or the floor, the wall, the couch, the door...they seem to be everywhere.

• Chasing after and inspecting a centipede (and learning that we don't love the feeling of all those legs touching our noses and whiskers)

• June once found a shed antler in our fenced-in yard, behind the garage, which was thoroughly unexpected.

• My in-laws have a couple of apple trees that they let us harvest from each Fall and I grab a lot for making juice and cider and apple butter, etc.; if one falls off the counter, it's instantly June's new, favorite "ball" to "steal" and carry around the house.

• When we have spaghetti, we hand out a couple pieces of uncooked noodles because the cronch noise is so ASMR satisfying, but also because it's a bit of a challenge for the girls to pick the noodles up off the floor (to be fair, it's a challenge for us humans, too).

• June will sometimes bring us things she's found: a sock that fell out of a laundry basket, a shoe, a piece of paper she found on the floor in the office, a pen that fell under the desk, a piece of packaging from the recycling waiting to go outside. She likes to show off what she's found, so we usually accept her offering and ask her to go find what else we left out or didn't clean up...

A lot of the things in the list are very dog-led, meaning it's enrichment that came about because the girls found something or tried something or did something to create an opportunity for enrichment. While this might seem like mischief or a dog searching out trouble (ok, it doesn't just seem like it...it often is exactly that), I like to look at it as my doggos telling me what they like to do: when given a chance to choose their own activities, what do they decide to do??

A lot of these activities tell me that my girls like to search - for food, for toys, for things to play with, etc. - and they like a bit of problem solving or working to get at something even if something of similar quality and appeal is readily available! Armed with that information, we've tried to intentionally incorporate some of the activities into the enrichment rotation in order to offer them activities we know they'll like, to meet their needs and preferences, and to add variety to the enrichment all dogs need to thrive!

If you have a fun idea or have come across, we'll say, unconventional enrichment with your dog, we'd love to hear about it!