You may have heard about enrichment and using enrichment to make your puppy's
life better,
but do you really know what enrichment is doing to your relationship with your
dog? In today's video,
we're going to talk about the unpopular truth that comes along with puppy
enrichment and the things that you can do to make sure that you are building the
best possible bond with your dog I'm Instructor. Shannon,
welcome back to McCann Dogs.
Every week on this channel,
we talk about how to do great things to enrich the bond that you have with your
dog. Now, today,
what we want to do is talk about enrichment itself and what that actually means
the word enrich means to add something to the life of your dog.
So we want to do this as much as we can, but with purpose. Now,
keeping in mind that what we want to do is create a puppy or a dog that really
loves to be with us, to listen to us and to work with us.
We want to make sure that the games that we're using to enrich our dog's lives
and the up being things that will benefit us rather than working against us.
Think about good enrichments as things that really benefit the bond that you
share with your dog, they will help your dog understand how to listen better,
help them understand how to communicate better with you,
and basically give them a better quality of life overall.
Good enrichment games create a bond, games bond.
Now on the opposite end of that spectrum,
we have enrichments that do not work well for us whatsoever.
And those are things that tend to act like a babysitter in your absence.
A lot of times,
what we find is that kids get plunked in front of TVs or video screens as a
way to sort of keep them occupied while you're busy with other things in your
life, which is okay on the very occasional time. But most of the time,
we want to make sure that those things that we're giving our dogs to do those
games, we're giving them to play.
Don't serve as a distraction from day to day life.
We want to make sure that we spend a lot of time teaching our dogs and teaching
our puppies, how to listen, how to work with us nicely.
And we can really use games and enrichments to help benefit that.
The problem with the words,
puppy enrichment is that they have caused a lot of confusion.
There's a lot of games that you can purchase from stores that promise enrichment
value for your dog.
And they promise that you'll get good behavior from your dog through these
games. Unfortunately, that's just not true.
There's all sorts of other ideas out there for enrichments as well.
Things like ball pits and snuffle mats and doggy daycare and leash-free parks.
All of those things will add enrichment to your dog's life,
but what are they taking away in the meantime,
the trouble with those enrichments is that they end up rewarding your dog
and reinforcing your dog for behavior that doesn't involve you.
And unfortunately, it's not a learning situation for your dog.
So they're getting a lot of their energy drain and they're getting a lot of
their needs met by things that are external to you.
And the bond that you're trying to build with your dog.
We help nearly 1500 students in our in-house and online classes every week.
And something.
That we see that's very frustrating for all of them is how these enrichments can
work against you.
We want you to know that these games are never going to help your dog training.
So the trouble with those enrichments is that your puppy or your dog will be
self-satisfying without you and getting a lot of reinforcement for doing things
that don't involve you.
The enrichments that you can use to help your puppy training are things that are
going to involve you in things that are going to make you valuable in your dog's
eyes.
So I want you to change the way you think about enrichment with your puppy and
how I like to organize this is I consider enrichments from column A,
to be enrichments that are going to help my training enrichments from column B
are things that I want to use sparingly, just to add some fun to my dog's life,
but only if I'm in the situation where I know that that is going to be okay with
my dog. If I have a dog that's still not quite listening,
or they're challenging me in the home,
I'm going to make sure that I saved the enrichments from column B for later on
down the road.
Enrichments from column A are things that are going to be very valuable for your
bond with your dog. They're things like trick training,
which helps open up the lines of communication with your dog. And it's a really,
really fun way of doing that. Things like training,
actual skills have dual benefit.
Not only will it help you build a bond with your dog,
but it'll also have the nice side effect of your dog,
learning that skill and getting repetition and of that skill.
Other enrichments from column A include things like scenting games that have you
involved as a component as well.
So we can hide things and help our dogs find them.
There's all sorts of fun ways to make training part of your day to day life.
The enrichments from column B are the things like snuffle mats and ball pits and
sending your dog off to daycare.
All of those things have one element that's missing, and that is you,
which means there's no opportunity for that activity to help you bond with your
dog. And it actually will work against you because your dog's needs are being
fulfilled outside of you. How are you using enrichment activities?
Are you using snuffle mats? Do you do a lot of trick training with your dog?
Let me know in the comments below.
So how do you keep it straight to help you out?
I've created a guide that will show you the enrichments from column A versus the
enrichments from column B. Now it's not all bad.
There are definitely situations where those enrichments from column B,
are going to come in really handy for you. For example, I had a Reggie,
my oldest Toller was down for a couple of weeks after having surgery and he
needed things to help exercise his mind while he was healing.
And he wasn't able to do a lot of physical activity.
So some of those enrichments from column B were really, really helpful.
During that period of time,
you might have an older dog that you're just starting to do some training with
because you're seeing some behavioral issues,
or maybe you have a rehomed dog that you're seeing some problems with that
you're trying to work through using enrichments from column B.
At the same time that you're working a training program can be a really,
really beneficial thing. You just need to make sure that you're doing it right.
Now we're talking about enrichment today,
but do you know that I'm really talking about leadership?
The enrichment's from column a will help your dog see you as a leader and dogs
who see their owners as leaders love working for them, love being with them.
And that natural bond is just going to develop things like walking on leash
training is going to be great for your leadership.
Even things like trick training is going to be great for opening up the lines of
communication and helping your dog learn to look to you as a leader. Now,
what I don't want is for you to accidentally be a bad leader for your dog,
and to help avoid that, click this card,
don't forget to download your Better Together Guide from the description below
so that you can understand the enrichments from column a versus the enrichments
in column B and which are right for your dog. On that note.
I'm Shannon happy training.