Happy New Year everyone! I can’t believe we’re already into our 2nd year of training challenges. Thank you to everyone who has participated thus far and posted your progress on social media. I’m excited to get this year started!
A little debrief about training challenges this year: they’re all enrichment-focused! Most of you know by now that our book, Canine Enrichment for the Real World, came out a few months ago (a huge thank you to everyone who’s purchased!) In honor of that, we decided to go through the book and set a training challenge based on the different categories of enrichment. So if you find yourself needing a little extra help in completing challenges in addition to the FB Live videos and these blog posts, there is plenty more info in the book.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of enrichment, the simple definition is: meeting all of an animal’s needs. We can expand that to a full definition: enrichment means meeting all of an animal’s needs in order to empower them to perform species-typical behavior in healthy, safe, and appropriate ways. One of the challenging things about working on enrichment with our pets is that there are several species-typical behaviors that we don’t like: chewing, digging, barking, scratching, etc. But just because we don’t like a particular behavior doesn’t mean that we don’t have to meet that need. It means that we often need to think outside of the box on how we can meet our pet’s needs in a way that we also enjoy or at least don’t mind.
Additionally, we need to actually see a change in our pet’s behavior to count that activity as enriching. If we provide our pets with activities or items that don’t elicit them performing species-typical behavior in healthy, safe, and appropriate ways then those activities or items are not enriching. If your dog is afraid of going on walks, then walks are not enriching. If your cat doesn’t use the scratching post, then the post is not enriching (without some training to teach her how!) We need to see the results to determine if what we’re doing is working.
What I love about enrichment is that it helps improve behavior! There are many times where clients come to me for help with their pet’s behavior and it’s the simpler enrichment activities that give them the desired outcome instead of complicated training activities. When animals’ needs are being met they behave better.
All of that leads us into our January 2020 challenge:
Draft an enrichment plan for your pet
Specifically, I want you to look at one or two undesirable behaviors that your pet does, consider what needs those behaviors are meeting (because all behavior serves a function to the individual performing it), and figure out how you can meet that need in a more desirable way. While the materials we’re providing are dog-centric, you can do this challenge with any species! I’m considering drafting an enrichment plan for my turtle, Zorro.
I talked a bit about using enrichment to mediate frustrating behaviors in a fairly recent blog post about my nemesis: Winter Oso. Check out that post here if you haven’t read it already. “Winter Oso” is what we call our dog when it starts getting cold out and he starts getting squirrely. I knew that this behavior change was because I wasn’t meeting his needs well in the winter, but I wasn’t sure exactly which was deficient. Let’s go through creating an enrichment plan for Winter Oso. I’ll use our enrichment chart (pages 195-196 of the book) to make it easier to plan:
| Aspect of Enrichment | Is this need being met? | Agency? | Priority | Plan of Action |
| Health/Veterinary | ||||
| Hygiene | ||||
| Diet/Nutrition | ||||
| Physical Exercise | ||||
| Sensory Stimulation | ||||
| Safety | ||||
| Security | ||||
| Instinctual Behaviors | ||||
| Foraging | ||||
| Social Interaction | ||||
| Mental Exercise | ||||
| Independence | ||||
| Environment | ||||
| Calming |
The first step is listing out the undesirable behaviors you’d like to see less of and the desirable behaviors you’d like to see more of. For Winter Oso, it looks like this:
Undesirable behaviors:
- Increased activity at night
- Destuffing his bed
- Inappropriate investigation of household items within his reach
Desirable behaviors:
- Sleeping in the evenings
After you have your desirable and undesirable behaviors, fill out the first column “Is This Need Being Met?” based on the behaviors you previously listed. What categories of needs do those undesirable behaviors likely fall in? What function do they serve? Here’s what that looks like for Winter Oso (I threw in other things we’re working on not listed above as well to give you a full picture):
| Aspect of Enrichment | Is this need being met? | Agency? | Priority | Plan of Action |
| Health/Veterinary | Likely | |||
| Hygiene | IP: working on back nails | |||
| Diet/Nutrition | Likely | |||
| Physical Exercise | Potential Room for Growth: winter behavior | |||
| Sensory Stimulation | Likely | |||
| Safety | Likely | |||
| Security | IP: counterconditioning to fireplace | |||
| Instinctual Behaviors | Potential Room for Growth: destuffing bed in winter | |||
| Foraging | Likely | |||
| Social Interaction | IP: meeting more people | |||
| Mental Exercise | Potential Room for Growth: winter behavior | |||
| Independence | Likely | |||
| Environment | Likely | |||
| Calming | Likely |
The categories that his undesirable behaviors might be meeting include: Physical Exercise, Mental Exercise, and Instinctual Behaviors (specifically chewing/gutting). We now go to the next category: Agency. Agency can be defined as: the ability to have some level of control in our environment and be able to make choices that will result in a desirable outcome. If an animal doesn’t have agency within a category then that category doesn’t meet the definition of enrichment either.
| Aspect of Enrichment | Is this need being met? | Agency? | Priority | Plan of Action |
| Health/Veterinary | Likely | IP: cooperative care & happy vet visits | ||
| Hygiene | IP: working on back nails | Appropriate | ||
| Diet/Nutrition | Likely | Appropriate | ||
| Physical Exercise | Potential Room for Growth: winter behavior | Appropriate | ||
| Sensory Stimulation | Likely | Appropriate | ||
| Safety | Likely | Appropriate | ||
| Security | IP: counterconditioning to fireplace | Appropriate | ||
| Instinctual Behaviors | Potential Room for Growth: destuffing bed in winter | Inappropriate: destuffing bed | ||
| Foraging | Likely | Appropriate | ||
| Social Interaction | IP: meeting more people | Appropriate | ||
| Mental Exercise | Potential Room for Growth: winter behavior | Appropriate | ||
| Independence | Likely | Appropriate | ||
| Environment | Likely | Appropriate | ||
| Calming | Likely | Appropriate |
Oso has a lot of agency in his daily life and we’ve spent a good deal of time teaching him that he has choices in difficult situations. We’re still working on medical handling but you can also see that one area that he has too much agency in is having access to his bed so as to destuff it. Last winter we put one of them away before he destroyed it completely. This year we’ve been working on teaching him more appropriate choices.
Phew! If you’re following along with your own enrichment plan these two columns alone probably took quite a while to complete. Let’s put a pin in this here and get into the second two columns next week.
Now what?
- Get a blank copy of the enrichment chart along with a how-to guide here: http://petharmonytraining.com/enrichmentchart
- Start filling out the first two columns!
- Stuck? Check out our book for more info on everything covered here.
Happy training!
Allie