Enrichment is a vital part of a dog’s overall well-being—it keeps their minds active, helps reduce stress, and can prevent boredom-related behaviours like chewing or excessive barking. Just like physical exercise, mental stimulation plays an important role in keeping your dog happy and balanced. That’s why we include enrichment in our daily routines and encourage you to continue it at home! Have a look at our simple DIY enrichment ideas to keep your dog engaged, challenged, and content outside of daycare too.
Cardboard containers make great destructible treat dispensers. Empty toilet paper tubes or paper towel rolls can be stuffed with soft treats. For example, spread peanut butter or cream cheese along the inside of the cardboard tube. Your dog will have to lick the treat out while preventing the tube from rolling away or being squished flat. To increase the challenge, fold down the ends of the tube so your dog must rip into the cardboard to get at the goodies inside. And for a longer-lasting treat, freeze the tube and its contents before giving it to your dog.
If your dog enjoys playing hide-and-seek with treats, this toy will really up the difficulty level. All you need is a plastic kiddie pool and tons of balls. Fill the kiddie pool with the balls, then sprinkle kibble or treats on top. As your dog walks through the balls to retrieve the food, the balls, and therefore the treats, will keep shifting positions, keeping your dog occupied for a long time.
All you need are tennis balls, a muffin tin and your dog's favourite treats. To setup this game: Disperse small dog treats into the cups of a metal muffin tin. Then place tennis balls or on top of each cup to hide the treats. You can make this game more challenging for your pup by keeping some slots empty.
If you feed your dog dry food, you can hide some or all of their food in the box. This will make meal times much more interesting
Destroying, chewing, and shredding the box until there's nothing left but a mess for you to clean up provides your dog with healthy mental stimulation and often a sense of accomplishment if they've done what they set out to do. Hiding treats inside means they have to work harder to rip open the box to get the treats.
At Sully’s one of our daily enrichment games you’ll find on the report card is our Scavenger Hunt! This is where we will separate the dogs from the room & hide treats around the building then let your dogs sniff them out!
Take your dog out of the room & hide the treats in easy-to-find spots at first, like on the floor or low shelves. You can make it harder as your dog gets better at the game. We recommend using something smelly or their favourite treat like cheese, bacon or ham at first
Show your dog the treat and let them sniff the treat. Say a cue like "find it" so your dog starts associating this word with the game, encourage & and let your dog start searching for the treats.
Once they’ve found a treat give them loads of praise like ‘good job’ & ‘well done’ continue to use the word ‘find it’ if more treats are still in the room.
Praise & repeat the process & they’ll soon get the hang of it!
Sniffing out treats taps into their natural instincts to forage and hunt. Just like we need puzzles, books, or hobbies to keep our minds sharp, dogs need mental stimulation, too.
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