Dog Enrichment (eBook)

INTRODUCTION:

What Is Enrichment?

Meeting Our Dog’s Needs

Our dogs are valued members of our family and are no longer faced with the daily challenges of finding enough food to eat, keeping safe from threats and finding shelter in order to survive. We meet all their basic needs by providing them with food and water, sharing our warm and cosy houses with them, taking them to the vets when they are unwell and making sure no scary predators can come and hurt them. Job done? Well, not completely, because we want our dogs not just to survive but to thrive. We want them to find fulfilment in their existence and that means meeting their higher needs of social connection and mental challenge through choice, novelty and problem-solving with their family – whether those family members have two legs or four. That is what enrichment is, making sure that all of your dog’s needs are met: physical, mental and emotional. By meeting our dog’s needs, we are creating happy dogs and, seeing as they bring us so much happiness, it seems like a fair exchange.

Enrichment for Captive Animals

Great, we understand the concept of enrichment. We’re on board and keen to get started. How do we go about doing it? How do we know the needs of our dogs? How do we ensure that the activities we plan will meet those needs? To answer these questions, it is useful to look at where the concept of enrichment originally started: in zoos.

Have you ever been to a zoo and noticed how zookeepers feed the animals? The tigers aren’t given their meat in a silver bowl; the monkeys don’t sit nicely around a table. Their food is scattered, hidden and placed just out of reach. The tigers have to climb a high pole to retrieve their dinner and the monkeys have to get their fruit out of the inside of logs. Why? Because it provides a mental and physical challenge, which occupies the animals and fulfils their day-to-day life.

Zoos once contained small, barren, concrete cages inhabited by some very sad-looking animals indeed. The classic images of the repetitively pacing bear and the motionless and silent chimpanzee are examples of unhappy animals that are chronically stressed and under-stimulated. It wasn’t until the 1960s that people began to consider how these animals compared with their active and engaged wild counterparts. As research into the behaviour of wild animals progressed, scientists were able to uncover what different species did when in the wild and to start setting up enclosures to make it possible for captive animals to do the same. For instance, meerkats live in groups, spend a lot of time digging, sleep and hide underground, and always have a lookout posted on higher ground to keep watch for predators. Now zoos have mobs of meerkats living together, provide them with sandy substrate to dig in, create sleeping areas that mimic underground burrows, and have high places like fake termite mounds and upturned tree trunks for meerkats on sentry duty. The animal welfare movement was born, and captive animals now live mentally and physically healthier, longer lives, with better reproductive success. In other words, they are happier.

Canine Enrichment

Now let’s apply these concepts to our dogs. ‘How do they behave in the wild?’ is a difficult question when it comes to domesticated animals. Let’s rule out the idea of wolves as wild versions of dogs. With around 15,000 years of natural and artificial selection, including physiological, morphological and behavioural changes, between them and our current dogs, the comparison isn’t accurate. Current scientific evidence points to genetic changes including an increase in boldness around humans, which allowed a move from wild hunting in a pack to scavenging on waste from human habitations at a very early stage in their domestication process. The idea of dogs as pack animals, always trying to be alpha of their hunting group, is completely outdated and scientifically disproven (see Chapter 8 for more details).

The closest we’ve got to wild dogs currently in existence are ‘street’ or ‘free-living’ dogs that exist within the human urban environment but are not under human management. They are seen in many locations around the world and are prevalent in India, Russia and South America. These dogs are scavengers, feeding off human rubbish and taking shelter wherever they can find it in the urban landscape. This includes, famously, using the underground train stations of Russia as a place of warmth in the winter. Dogs roam the streets, exploring the sights, sounds and smells of their environment and searching for food to scavenge, in between finding comfortable spots for a nap. This gives us a major clue as to how our dogs would spend their lives if they had choice and freedom. Investigating sights, sounds, smells, textures and tastes, and choosing which activities to do and when, is a key part of enrichment for your dog.

Breed-Specific Enrichment

We can look further into what our dog might enjoy by starting to think about what breed (or mix of breeds) they are. As humans, we are always tinkering with the genetic make-up of domesticated animals, to promote the characteristics that are useful for our day-to-day life. Predominantly, we have done this through breeding animals that possess traits that are desirable at the time, such as the ability to run fast, to be a certain size, or to have a good sense of smell. By breeding together individuals that show these traits, we hope that they will be inherited by their offspring. Due to the natural variability in how traits are inherited and expressed, we can further select which animals to breed together from those offspring, so that over time the trait becomes more and more exaggerated. For instance, if I wanted to create smaller dogs, I would systematically breed the smallest dogs from successive litters together (of different lineages preferably, although this hasn’t always been the case in modern breeding practices). This would mean that over multiple generations, the genes for smallness would be inherited, until I was left with a very small dog indeed. This is the basis of how all the different breeds of dogs that we see today have been created.

This process of selective breeding by humans has led us to the extremes of body shape and temperament that we see today: from the Chihuahua to the Great Dane, from the French Bulldog to the Springer Spaniel. Each of the breeds that exist today have been bred over multiple generations for a specific purpose and are generally classified using seven groups: gundog, hound, pastoral, terrier, toy, utility and working. To understand how these groups and breeds differ, we need to understand their predatory motor pattern (PMP). The PMP is the full sequence of behaviours from spotting prey, through stalking and chasing, to grabbing and killing, then eating the prey during a hunt.

To create dogs that were useful to us for specific purposes, we enhanced or supressed different parts of their PMP through breeding. For instance, to enable Labrador Retrievers to bring back things that we had killed, the orient (spotting prey) and grab-bite instincts had to be strong but the kill-bite and dissect elements had to be weak. For Terriers to hunt vermin as pest control, the chase, grab-bite and kill-bite instincts had to be exaggerated. For Bernese Mountain Dogs, as livestock guarders, all parts of the PMP had to be suppressed, while Border Collies needed strong orient, eye, stalk and chase instincts but weak grab-bite and killbite instincts. The areas of the PMP that have been exaggerated through breeding are really fun for dogs to carry out and they will get a rush of happy hormones every time they do it. Having a look at the background to your specific dog’s breed will therefore help you learn what they have a tendency to enjoy. You can then build this into your enrichment plan. If you have a lovely crossbreed, then have a look at all the background breeds. If you’re not sure of any of the breeds that make up your dog, don’t worry – even within a breed, every individual is different so you can just try lots of different activities and see which your dog enjoys!

Enrichment for Your Dog

Are these dog- and breed-specific behaviours starting to sound familiar? Has your pup ever scavenged something disgusting and eaten it while out on a walk? Dug up your lawn? Carried your favourite shoes around? Tried to round up your visitors? Well, guess what – our dogs will always find ways of fulfilling their needs one way or another. We can’t suppress their natural behaviours; they will always find an outlet for them, whether we approve of it or not! Telling them off for expressing their genetically predetermined behaviours, many of which we have bred them to do, seems pretty unreasonable, doesn’t it? So how about we provide them with enrichment outlets for these behaviours that are acceptable to us humans and satisfying for our dogs? Let’s work with our dogs rather than against them. Every dog is different and your role is to ensure that the enrichment...