Mental stimulation can double as relationship-building.

Here is the second installment of our discussion on mental stimulation. As I mentioned previously, we can go beyond food dispensing toys to give our dogs a daily dosage of mental stimulation.
Some people get it right and understand the importance of a “sniff walk” for their dog. Indeed, for how we use sight to understand the world, our dogs smell it. Smell being their most reliable sense. By a “sniff walk” I mean taking your dog for a stroll where the distance covered is irrelevant in which we allow the dog to move at its own pace- taking as much time as he wants sniffing. This could be challenging for some folks because they do take their dog on a walk (yah!) but they have their own agenda. The walk must double as their fitness routine, so they just want to get it done fast. My advice to this bunch is to take their dog’s sniff walk as a bonus within their mental health.  To see this as an opportunity to experience the surroundings in Slow mo.  Wow!  What a concept!  We can also re-frame and think of our workout time as our workout time, aside from allowing it to be during the dog sniffing opportunities.

 

 In addition to the sniff or slow walk, there are other ways we can hang out with our dogs and provide a rich environment for their brain and well-being.  Here is an idea that I have witnessed to be very beneficial to dogs:  I teach owners how to do some simple TTouches on their dog as part of my Developing the Confident Dog class.

This past Saturday, every participant in the class saw how quickly their dog went from alert (and some a bit stressed) to totally relaxed, choosing to lie down on their mats to receive the benefits of their human’s touch. Engaging your dog with TTouch can teach your dog’s nervous system to oscillate from fidgety to relaxed. The more your dog experiences these different modalities, the easier it will be for your dog to recuperate from an upsetting event or just to be able to relax when you are busy at home and can't concentrate on your dog. TTouch is not a massage and is not petting either. It is its own modality that is relatively easy to learn and worth exploring. To learn more visit: www.TTouch.com.

One of my favorite things to do with my dogs is to play with them! We have all sorts of games and most of them involve an object or toy. I am defining play as any activity in which participants engage voluntarily and the only purpose is to have fun.  The topic of play has been well researched and as a result there is ample information about what constitutes “good” play. Also, quite relevant is how can we play with our dogs in a manner that they find enjoyable and not threatening.  If play is your “thing”  look up the work of Marc Bekoff,  www.marcbekoff.com - a leading authority in dog play and who has done tremendous work surrounding the emotional lives of animals.

I personally like it when my dogs invent their own games.  I mostly follow their lead when they come up with a new activity that we can do together. Here are a couple of examples:

After their breakfast both Deuce and Rio go to our long hallway just off the kitchen.  They both lie there with either one ball (more fun for Rio- perhaps less fun for Deuce) or a ball a piece.  The game consists of one of us kicking the ball so that Rio goes after it.  She gets tremendous pleasure in this. If Deuce was not that interested in balls I tend to wonder if Rio would enjoy the activity.  For this particular game, I changed some of Rio’s “rules” and I make sure Deuce has another ball to keep as his own, or we take turns tossing the ball in such a manner that Deuce gets it sometimes too- not only Rio. Being able to get to a ball that lands unpredictably is where the fun is at.

Deuce and I have our own special game that consists of Deuce taking my sheepherding cues (we actually do go sheepherding) inside our home as he “herds” a ball.  Not only is this game highly reinforcing for Deuce, but our herding practice with “real” sheep has improved tremendously.

I encourage you to be open to your dog’s definition of “games” and “fun”.  I promise you that you will also reap the benefits as you see your blood pressure drop and your breathing become more fluid. At least mine dose whenever I choose to play with my dogs.

In closing, I strongly suggest people think of mental stimulation as a dog’s ability to problem solve. Again, the activities that can promote this are truly amazing, but here I want to refer to one that is so accessible to anyone willing to invest in learning how to shape behavior with a clicker. In essence shaping behavior is teaching a behavior by approximation.  Think of it as a process similar (yet much more complex and interesting) than the popular game of “hot” and “cold” in which someone is getting clues as to the proximity of an object or a specific action it must do. To learn more visit: www.clickertraining.com

If you live in the Santa Fe area, I encourage to enroll in one of my classes. Yes, your dog will learn new skills but equally important you will learn how to adequately teach your dog to problem solve. In addition, you will learn training skills and games that you can incorporate at home as part of your dog’s mental stimulation routine.

Why mental stimulation is so critical to your dog’s well-being.

If you are at all in the dog “circle” you have unmistakably heard about mental stimulation. What I think sometimes trainers, like myself, forget to do is to explain to people a couple of important factors about mental stimulation.

 

First off, I would like to define mental stimulation.

It is any activity that your dog enjoys, can engage in, and that in some way or another satiates an innate (natural) canine need. Now, we must dive into what constitutes innate behaviors in dogs. The most scientific way I know how to do this is to consider who dogs are:

We know that dogs are predators. They acquire their preferred food (or at least they did when they were hunting since most present day dogs do not hunt for their food) by chasing down their prey, and they eat it by dissecting it.  As hunters, they do not get a guaranteed meal either so we know that they are opportunistic feeders, as well as scavengers. There in itself, we have quite a few clues as to what sort of activities we might come up with that emulates  behaviors all dogs engage in when they are hunting after a prey or feeding.

In delving into it more closely, we discover that dogs, like any other predator, are highly interested in movement because movement might mean an opportunity to eat. We also now know that they have powerful canine molars to grind and teeth to shred meat apart. Another important clue!

So here are some activities that can supply your dog the opportunity of species-specific behaviors: if we add less predictability to how we feed our dogs, we might just hit the jackpot!

Simply put, instead of serving your dog its meal from a ceramic bowl, make that food come alive.
Toss your dog’s high-quality kibble or dry treats up in the air, without much restrain, so that it spreads everywhere. Encourage your dog the first few times to find each and every one of the individual pieces of kibble as it uses it’s very powerful sense of smell. If you are feeding raw, you will not be able to do this, so please do not try this at home.

Alternatively, you can flick away each piece of kibble down a hallway while creating some really interesting motion for your dog. Now your dog has to run after every single one of them. Does this activity resembles a natural way of feeding for your dog?  Think about it; it’s the same meal but different behaviors to acquire it: chasing to eat.

When it comes to dogs dissecting their protein for consumption, we can find a myriad of manners to feed our dogs so that they have to “work” with those powerful mouths for their food.

Replace then, the food bowl for a Kong filled with your dog’s daily chow, and not just a thin coat of peanut butter.  Now you got your dog’s attention!  It might take your dog 2 minutes or even longer to extract its daily food and that definitively beats spending only 30 seconds in one of the most salient activities of the day for most modern dogs:  consuming food.  If you choose to feed your dog in this manner, you will most likely need to serve more than one Kong.  Wow! The fun just doubled. I strongly suggest feeding your dog like this at least once a day.

You can also add some spin to how your dog gets its meal.  Some really clever food-dispensing toys require that the dog makes the toy spin in order for the kibble to come out. Remember how attractive movement is for our dogs? Again, if you feed raw, then find some acceptable non-raw item that could add some much needed entertainment to your dog’s day. It could be a boiled egg, sardines or perhaps your dog is into apples. I know of a very lucky dog that gets served daily an apple in a Kong.

While all dogs are predators and engage in one way or another in typical canine behaviors, each dog is also an individual. So spending a bit of time discovering which activities your dog enjoys will pay off. Some dogs might get scared if we attempt to throw up in the air a bunch of kibble, so perhaps for this type of dog, a much more low key toy or even tossing each piece of kibble gently (this does not take as long as you might think BTW) is more appropriate. Now, it goes without saying, not because our dogs are scavengers does it mean that we do not have to provide some guidance as to how to pull the food out of a food dispensing toy. So make sure to make things easy for your dog so that he is successful in getting the food out of the toy.  Keep him in the game!  Once he can do this with some effort but still gets to extract the food, make things a bit more challenging for your dog.

Of course, there are also games that provide both mental stimulation as well as physical opportunities for your dog, which don't always involve eating. I will be exploring some of these activities in future posts. Stay tuned!

Thank The Dog!

Giving the dogs food-dispensing toys early on these cold mornings is a nice way to get in some needed mental stimulation when no one (okay, I lie… they do) wants to go out and play in the cold.

Deuce thinks that every cool toy has his name written on it - actually carved onto it. He can express his preference for certain toys, like the wobbling pin for example, by chiming in with a very high pitch sound. He uses this sound as a way of telling me, and Rio of course, that he thinks the world is unfair and that if he does not have “x” toy immediately well all hell might break loose and…

So the way I have figure this out is to make sure the dogs play with their food dispensing toys in separate rooms. Funny, because they can eat marrowbones and other chewies next to each other. In fact more proper than the Queen Mum drinking tea! But these kibble-happy toys… ah, that is a whole different matter.

I once heard Jean Donaldson say that it makes sense that Border Collies are high on the list of toy guarders. She did not elaborate any further, but if you think of it, guarding is all about wanting something (a resource) at a given time. And Border Collies being obsessive little devils (or maybe they are just super focused!) can be very “opinionated” when it comes to balls and other toys.

So, I don't sweat it. I give Deuce his rolling pin with kibble behind a closed door and Rio has a selection of toys that we rotate.

One recent morning, as I am filling the toys and escorting Deuce to the room to eat out of the toy, he took a beeline in the opposite direction and went straight towards Rio because he heard her already maneuvering her toy and eating away.

As he is running with speedy steps towards her I rush behind him while hearing his little 'complaining voice'… "the world is so unfair, woof, woof woof…"

I called him back and escorted him to his designated spot. Rio had stopped eating by now and is just kind of standing next to her toy.

Once Deuce was working on his, I came back to her and began to roll her ball as if wanting to prove to her how fun this was. She was watching me sheepishly after Deuce admonish her about who owns what in this home…

I felt bad for Rio seeing that she was kind of crushed, but I also felt grateful to her for diffusing a situation that could very much escalated into the dogs 'exchanging words' as I like to say or even worse.

You see, every time a dog diffuses a potential conflict we should notice that and profusely “thank” the dog for its brilliance and comportment. It is so much easier and fun to have manageable conflicts between dogs instead of conflicts that escalate into fights. Believe me, I know how easy it is to go about our very important and busy day and not even notice what the dog just did.

Rio and I are cool with Deuce being a bit pushy about this particular toy. Rio too has her own “special” toys and other quirky behaviors that Deuce tolerates like a champ.

So as I see it, my job here is to be the adult. And to make sure my dogs learn to accommodate one another or to take the high-road as Rio did. In addition, my job entails telling Rio that the next time the fun toys come out…that her toy is much prettier than Deuce’s, more fun and that I am going to show her some easier ways of extracting the food and that Deuce is going to have to 'suffer' without my help.

All this in an effort to rebuild her confidence by making her feel safe since I am in charge and because of this she can go back to having fun with her ball.