#128 - Try it: How to Find Indoor Activities for Dogs on Hot Days

When the temperatures soar, it can feel like your only option is to survive summer with the AC cranked up and a bored dog staring at you, but we’ve got your back. In this "Try It" episode of Enrichment for the Real World, Emily shares practical, low-effort indoor activities that meet your dog’s enrichment needs when going outside just isn’t safe.

You’ll learn how to turn your dog’s favorite outdoor activities into equally fulfilling indoor options, how to tweak and test your ideas to find what actually works for your pup, and why chaos goblin play is a valid enrichment strategy. Keep it simple. Keep it fun. And keep your dog from climbing the walls this summer.

TLDL (too long, didn’t listen): 

1️⃣ Adapt outdoor activities to indoor needs – Observe what your dog gets out of favorite outdoor pastimes (like physical exercise, sensory stimulation, or social interaction) and find creative ways to meet those same needs inside.

2️⃣ Test your ideas like a behavior scientist – Try new activities and watch how your dog responds. Did it meet their needs? Were they engaged? If not, tweak and try again.

3️⃣ Simplicity and sustainability win – You don’t need complicated setups or fancy gear. A few treats, a cardboard box, and a willingness to play like a chaos goblin can go a long way.

Links & Resources from the Episode

🧾 For full episode transcripts: Arial | OpenDyslexic

🎧 Episode #111 – Scent Work for Dogs: Enrichment That Supports the Whole Household (includes Anywhere But Here Protocol)

📚 Trash to Treasure: How We Use Recycled Enrichment to Support Natural Pet Behaviors

🎧 #86 – Q&A: Indoor Enrichment Activities Ideas

For the full episode show notes, including the resources mentioned in this episode, go here.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Emily: There aren't really that many things that I do with her that involve a whole lot of forethought or capital T training. A lot of our activities together, um, mostly just involve me throwing food on the ground for her to find and then running around like a couple of chaos goblins, like that's most of our activities together.

We may not be the most skilled human dog team who ever lived, but we get the job done and we have fun doing it. So that's an important thing to remember is that you don't have to make it really elaborate and you don't have to do a whole lot of extra stuff. Keep it simple, SmartyAnts. Just make sure that it's sustainable, enjoy, and enjoyable for both of you.

[00:00:34] Allie: Welcome to Enrichment for the Real World, the podcast devoted to improving the quality of life of pets and their people through enrichment. We are your hosts, Allie Bender...

[00:00:51] Emily: ...and I'm Emily Strong...

[00:00:53] Allie: ...and we are here to challenge and expand your view of what enrichment is, what enrichment can be and what enrichment can do for you and the animals in your lives. Let's get started.

Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Enrichment for the Real World, and I want to thank you for rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[00:01:13] Emily: It is summertime here in the Northern hemisphere, which means that in most places in the northern half of the globe, it is hot. And in many of those places it is dangerously hot for both humans and dogs to be spending a lot of time outdoors unless you have access to water or some other cool space.

I grew up in Austin, Texas, and I lived there for a total of 30 years, and the only way I survived was by wearing a bathing suit under my clothes for like half the year and spending as much time in the water as I possibly could. Like when I was done with work, I would go straight to Barton Springs or whatever body of water was closest, just take off my clothes and jump in the water.

I was a water baby when I was a Texan. So I can empathize with y'all. If you're scrambling to come up with indoor activities for dogs on hot days, you're not alone. That's super common when the sun is just absolutely blazing and the pavement is too hot. Enrichment doesn't have to stop. It just needs to move indoors.

So let's talk about how to do that first. Observe your dog's favorite activities and identify the impact that those activities have. So what needs do those activities meet? For example, if your dog likes to go on walks, those can potentially be providing physical exercise, mental exercise, sensory stim, stimulation, scent work, maybe even novelty.

So you know, lots of, lots of benefits from walking lots of. Theoretical benefits anyway. Hypothetical benefits and play dates with other dogs can provide physical exercise and social interaction. I guess sometimes mental exercise, depending on how they're playing. Fetch can provide physical exercise and sensory stimulation and social interaction with your human anyway.

Bonding time, right. Um, potentially even giving your dog the opportunity to chew if they like chewing on the ball while they're running around with it. So those are some examples of like looking at the activity and identifying what the dog is getting out of those activities. And the outcome for a lot of them is that the dog can then rest afterwards or at least calmly entertain themselves.

Rest doesn't have to necessarily mean asleep, but be in a restful state of some kind. So then the second step is come up with an indoor activity that can meet similar needs. So going back to the the walk, if your dog is getting physical and mental exercise, sensory stimulation, scent work, novelty from their walks, what activities can you do indoors that will meet those same needs?

I might collect nuisance for my dog. Uh, rubbing a rag on, uh, trees and grasses, um, asking a neighbor for their long lawn cuttings. Asking a friend to give me some of their small mammals used bedding. Well, now that I have bundini, I can just grab Bundini bedding, um, or even just diluting down some essential oils.

And then I would put the rag or atch it or whatever, has those smells on them in a foraging ball like the IQ ball, along with some snacks and let my dog run around with the balls, smelling the smells, getting the snacks out, exploring, and hypothetically by doing something like that, we've ticked all the same boxes as a walk wood.

For play dates on the other hand, um, do you have a space for the dog friend to come to your house and play indoors? Is your indoor space big enough for that? Depending on their size and their play style and your layout and all of that stuff? Or do you have a shady backyard and can you wet down the dogs before letting them play in the backyard?

So they're still getting to play, but they're just doing it in a space where you can actually control the temperature. Or does your dog like to wrestle with you? Can you be your dog's playmate and do a wrestling match? Is your, is wrestling your dog's play style? Um, and will a good wrestling match with their favorite human tide them over?

Is that good enough to substitute for a play date? For fetch, can you play hide the ball instead? So that would look like hiding the ball in nearby in an easy to find place. At first, when before your dog knows how to play the game, and they find it, they bring it back to you, you hide it again, and gradually over time as they get used to the game, you increase the difficulty until.

You can confine your dog, hide the ball anywhere in the house, and then let your dog out to run around and and find it, right. Um, so these are just a few ideas and obviously they're not going to work for every day and every situation for every dog, but they're just examples of how we can modify outdoor activities.

To work in our houses and our yards. So for more ideas you can refer to the hot weather activities, resources that, um, we're including in the show notes. But again, those also are just ideas. Um, you can adapt these ideas, use them as like a, a springboard and adapt those ideas to make the most sense for you, your dog, your environment, your resources, all of that.

So then the next step is to do the thing. We've come up with ideas that we think will likely meet the same needs as those outdoor activities, but then we have to test our hypothesis. So do the thing with your dog and then observe how they engage with it. Do they enjoy it? Are they willingly and eagerly participating?

If not, is it because they don't know how to do the thing proficiently yet, and we need to teach them how to do it? Or are they doing it proficiently, but then they're avoiding it later. They don't show interest in it. They'll do it, but it doesn't actually impact them the way you'd hoped it would. So you have to remember that only the learner gets to decide if the activity is actually meeting their needs or ticking the same boxes that the outdoor activity does.

Um, and that's something that I think, can be a little tricky when we're. First, learning how to observe our learners and listen to what they're telling us. But that's the important part, is remember that like they're the ones who will tell us whether or not our hypothesis is actually correct.

And if it isn't, the key isn't to throw the whole activity out, but just to figure out how to modify it to make it better for them. Um, So you, you don't have to just give up on it if it doesn't work the first time you can. Try to assess like, what if I tweak this? What if I change that? What if we add this or take this away?

Um, what if we do this, but in a different location? So play around with it to see if you can figure out what it was about your first attempt, if that wasn't successful, rather than just throwing it out and saying, well, I tried that and it didn't work. Right. But assuming that it does work, the next step is to assess the efficacy.

So if your dog did reap the same benefits from the indoor activity that they get from the outdoor one, congratulations. That's awesome. Keep on doing the thing, but if not, try to figure out what it was exactly about the activity that didn't work.

Tweak the plan accordingly and try again. Or if it did work, but it required. Way more effort and bandwidth than the outdoor version. You can either try to simplify the activity and see if that gets the same results, or you can figure out if you can get away with doing this activity less frequently if you supplement with simpler, more sustainable activities in between.

So for example. Yeah, Miley has weekend play dates with some puppy friends, but by Thursday she starts getting squirrely again. So I'm figuring out that if I do some balance work on her fit paws bone on Wednesday or Thursday, followed by an extra long round of scent work for lunch, she can hold her tater tots until her Saturday play date that's enough to tide her over.

And that example isn't because of the hot weather, it's just due to my schedule and this. Schedule of our play date partners, but the concept remains the same. It's only sustainable for us to do play dates once a week, but other activities midweek can tide her over in the meantime. So let's talk about tips and common mistakes.

First of all, remember that the proportions of the various benefits of any given activity may differ. So for example, the food puzzle idea that I gave earlier may very well provide all of the same categories of needs as an actual walk, but it may not provide as much of each one. If you think about it on a walk, the walk is usually a longer more sustained activity.

They're getting more variation in smells than whatever smells you would put in an IQ ball that they would knock around to get food out. So that may mean that you need to do more of the food puzzle games than the walk to reap the same benefits.

Or like in the example with Miley Above, the only reason that a session on her Fit Bone and an extra long session of Scent Work can make up for her weekend play date is because those aren't the only ACT enrichment activities we do every day. Every day she either gets to play in our yard with copper or we go on an adventure walk and she gets at least one kind of scent work.

Every day. So she's getting physical exercise and social interaction through other means, but the fit pauses and the extra scent work provide the core strengthening exercises and the mental exercise that she gets from the play dates. And when the weather is bad here and we have to stay indoors because my little baji puppy, does not like rain.

She's better about it than she was when I first brought her home, but she still gives some serious side eye to rain. She still ops out a lot of the time, so our bad weather usually looks different than hot weather, bad weather, but. When it is bad weather and she opes out of going outside, then I let her do zoomies around the house while I egg her on.

Like I will intentionally ramp her up and let her tear around the house, uh, like a little whirlwind. And then, um, I will. Increase the amount of anywhere but here games that I set out for her to play.

I just do more of that when she refuses to go outside. And then we also do a lot of wrestling. Wrestling is definitely one of her play styles, and it's the one, only one that I'm actually physically capable of keeping up with her while doing, because I cannot chase a five and a half month old Biji puppy.

I simply cannot do that. So we wrestle and all of that is required for keeping her from climbing the walls when we can't go outside. But that segues nicely into my next tip, which is to quote Ted Lasso. Keep it simple. Smarty pants. It's gotta be sustainable and enjoyable for you too. The most complicated activity center that I made for her in that on that day, um, were those like. Nesting doll boxes. And even that isn't particularly complicated. It took about five minutes to ball up those treats in the newspaper and then shove them in the boxes. Um, it just did not take me very long to set that up.

And you'll notice that there aren't really that many things that I do with her that involve a whole lot of forethought or capital T training. A lot of our activities together, um, mostly just involve me throwing food on the ground for her to find and then running around like a couple of chaos goblins, like that's most of our activities together.

We may not be the most skilled human dog team who ever lived, but we get the job done and we have fun doing it. So that's an important thing to remember is that you don't have to make it really elaborate and you don't have to do a whole lot of extra stuff. Keep it simple, SmartyAnts. Just make sure that it's sustainable, enjoy, and enjoyable for both of you.

So to recap, first, observe your dog's favorite activities and identify the impact those activities have. Then come up with an indoor activity that can meet similar needs. Then do the thing, and then next is observe the impact of the thing and then assess the efficacy of the thing.

And there you go. That's how you figure out what. Indoor enrichment activities you can do when it's too hot to take your dog outside and still everybody make it through the summer, relatively intact and still loving each other. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Happy training.

[00:13:02] Allie: I hope you enjoy today's episode and if there's someone in your life who also needs to hear this, be sure to text it to them right now. If you're a pet parent looking for more tips on enrichment, behavior modification, and finding harmony with your pet, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Harmony training. If you're a behavior or training professional dedicated to enrichment for yourself, your clients, and their pets, check us out on TikTok and Instagram at Pet Harmony Pro.

As always, links to everything we discussed in this episode are in the show notes. Thank you to Ellen Yoakum for editing this episode and making us sound good. Our intro music is from Penguin Music on Pixa Bay. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps more pet lovers and professionals find us so they can bring enrichment into their world too.

Thank you for listening, and here's to harmony.