#155 - Try It: Engaging Indoor Games for Pets

Do you ever feel like enrichment has turned into a second full-time job?

Hours of prep. Fancy toys. Amazon carts. Storage bins. Guilt.

In this episode, Emily walks you through three simple, adaptable foraging game categories that take under 10 minutes to set up and leverage things you already have (yes, including trash).

Because enrichment doesn’t have to be aesthetic to be effective.

TLDL (too long, didn’t listen): 3 Key Takeaways 

1️⃣ Think in Categories, Not Products – When you understand the function of snuffle, scatter, and puzzle games, you can use what you already have instead of relying on specific (often expensive) toys. Concepts create flexibility.

2️⃣ Match the Challenge to the Learner – Adjust difficulty through texture, layering, obstacles, lighting, or containment so the activity fits your pet’s current skill level. 

3️⃣ Sustainable Beats Elaborate – The best enrichment plan is the one you can repeat consistently. Small, low-effort setups done regularly are more effective than occasional Pinterest-worthy productions.

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

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Emily: if you're thinking about. How to utilize the, the stuff that you have in your environment already, and you have these ideas in the back of your head. I'm willing to bet that you can come up with many other creative solutions that will work for the specific animals in your care, in the specific environment that you're operating in, because you're thinking about it in terms of, how can I take what I have and turn it into one of these three types of foraging toys? you really don't need expensive toys or tons of space or lots of time to make effective enrichment items, you can just do it with trash. I've spent a lifetime enriching animals with trash.

[00:00:43] 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...

[00:01:00] Emily: ...and I'm Emily Strong...

[00:01:02] 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.

[00:01:22] Emily: Do you ever wonder how to enrich your pet's life without. Turning it into a full-time job, like spending hours doing food and toy prep, or spending a bunch of money buying fancy toys. Uh, if, if that's you, this episode's for you. Uh, 'cause today I'm gonna give you three different forging games that are simple, safe, and adaptable for any home and

you can try in under 10 minutes. So these options will let you assess what is safe for your pet, what is challenging for your pet, And as a reminder, not every enrichment activity is right for every pet. Not every pet is going to engage with every item in a safe or effective way, and that's okay.

Learning quick flexible options helps us to reduce stress for both you and your pet, and it allows you to pivot when you realize that this particular material is not good for your pet, but the concept is, or vice versa. The material's fine, but the concept is super not what your pet needs, So by the end of this episode, you will know three simple forging activities with variations that you can try today, and then you can tweak them to meet your pet's needs.

So the goal is to find simple flexible options that are sustainable and enjoyable and that you can adapt to better meet your learners' needs and better fit the environment that you're operating in. And the reason this is so important is because foraging stimulates these natural behaviors that. Dogs evolved to do, and even cats and some other species as well. They evolved to find and procure food. They evolved to use their noses to find that food to dig for things, to look in different places, to shred things, to tear things, to chew things depending on the species. They evolved to use their bodies to procure food.

So giving them the option to do that hits that more like nature criterion that Hal Markowitz talked about when he was first implementing enrichment in the real world. And it also reduces boredom related stress, so, let's, let's dive into it.

First let's talk about the snuffle mat variants. That's the first game we're gonna be talking about. There's lots of different ways to provide a snuffle mat type of experience with just stuff that you have around the house.

Um, one is just rolling some food in a towel. If you roll the towel all the way up and food is in the different layers of that, um, that roll. It can be really fun and take several minutes for dogs or even cats or ferrets. You can also just scrunch it in a blanket or any other kind of fabrics that you have on the floor. Or you can use foraging boxes. I call them adventure boxes because I just save up all my trash. Like toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, any cardboard boxes from anything that gets shipped to us, packing paper. And I just like tear up the packing paper. Wrap just one or two little pieces of food in the paper, stuff it in all these different types of cardboard objects that I've been.

Ferreting away and then I put several of them into a cardboard box, like a, a shipping box, um, when I get enough objects. And so it is kind of an adventure 'cause she has to figure out how to open the cardboard box and then she has to. Open or engaged in some way with all of the different types of boxes and, and containers that are in there. All the different types of boxes require different engagement. it really does take me less than 10 minutes to put one of those boxes together. And it will take her sometimes upwards of half an hour to get through it all, to unpack everything, to find every bit of food, and then the cleanup.

Takes just a couple of minutes. It just does not take long to throw all of that stuff in a compost bag, chuck it in my compost and call it a day. So it's low effort for me, but it is high yield for Miley.

I'm also a big fan of using a cabbage head or a lettuce head and hiding food in there. So for people who are concerned about their dogs, eating cardboard or plastic or anything else that I've been talking about. If your dog is a dog who ingests that stuff at a, at a, at an amount that is concerning.

Then you can use an edible snuffle mat by, by using lettuce or cabbage of some kind, and just stuffing the food in, into the, the lettuce leaves or cabbage leaves and, and letting them get it out. That way if they chew it and swallow it, they got some veggies. It's a win. It's a win, right? All the way around. so that's game one.

Game two, we're gonna talk about different variants of scatter feeding. So, we actually have an entire episode about the sort of logistics of how to teach find it, which is like a basic scatter feeding game. That episode will be in the show notes of this episode, so if you want to learn just like the mechanics of like the how to teach a dog, how to do scatter feeding.

That's gonna be a really good episode for you. But for now, let's just talk about different textures that you can do scatter feeding on. So, um, there are lots of ways to increase or decrease the challenge based on the dog's current skillset or the cat's current skillset, almost any species, I think you could do some version of scatter feeding, but you can start with just an open, hard surfaced floor so that the food is really easy to find. Um, and then you can gradually dim the lights to make it harder for them to find the food. Just using their eyes alone so they can start to use their nose.

You can add obstacles, so putting food under things or inside of things. I like to start with bowls and boxes. Hiding food under pieces of fabric like blankets, towels, things like that. You can use. Any kind of, if you have any grass mats or anything like that. And then obviously we can move it outside and do it in the grass or the snow. Some dogs really like scatter feeding in the snow. Some dogs hate it. If you live in the desert, try scatter, feeding in the sand. You can just practice or, or play around with different substrates.

In places like shelters, I really like the AstroTurf type of grass mats because you can do it in the kennel and then the AstroTurf is something that you can disinfect, whereas it's harder to do that with like. Fabric. But if you see a dog eating AstroTurf or trying to eat it, obviously that's not the solution for them. So try something else.

So just think about how you can use the textures that are already in the environment to create a challenge for, for the dog. That is, that is, equal to their skill, their current skill level, and give them this opportunity to practice playing these nose work games in whatever environment works best for them.

All right, the third game is puzzle games. So there are several amazing food puzzles on the market. I absolutely love them. I have several myself. Not against food puzzles, but sometimes we need to do some DIY puzzle games and, um, some of our favorites are just using muffin tones putting some of the food in the muffin tin, putting a tennis ball on top so the dog has to knock tennis balls off.

I also like to, um, stack muffin tin. So put the food in, stack another muffin tin on top. Put food in that one stack, another one. So again, it can be more challenging for dogs who are already pretty adept at the muffin tin game.

You can also smear wet food, like canned food or yogurt into muffin tins and freeze them. So the dogs have to lick the frozen food out of the wells. And. Those pyramid pants, the silicone baking sheets with the little kind of pyramid shaped holes in them that are meant to catch grease are great for frozen lickable. You just smear some, whatever you wanna put in there. Canned food, yogurt, applesauce homemade, dog treats.

I also love using plastic bottles. I hate that plastic bottles exist. So we might as well get multiple uses out of them. Not make them single use but perhaps double use or more. And one way that we can upcycle plastic bottles is by putting food in the bottle. Cut as many holes as you want into those bottles. Just make sure that the bottle is secured so that it doesn't slip from underneath your knife or your scissors and just, you know, take out your aggression from the day onto the bottle and just stab it and then twist so that it creates an opening.

And do that. For dogs who are brand, brand new to this, just make a ton of holes in the plastic bottle and then, um. As your dog gets more proficient at pushing the bottle around and letting the food fall out of the holes that you made, you can make fewer and fewer holes

i've seen other dogs who seemed to enjoy the sound that the food made in the bottle and they would just shake the bottle like a Morocco and it, they kept the toy for days or weeks before they would forage from it.

Some of them never forged from it because they just really enjoyed having a Morocco. That is an equally valid use of that toy, right? It might not be a foraging toy for those dogs, but it is enriching for them. So it's really beautiful sensory enrichment. It's encouraging physical exercise if they're running around and shaking it.

So there's lots of just let the animal tell you how they wanna play with these things. Right. But if you, if you have these concepts in mind, and I just listed a few ideas for each of these game categories, but if you're thinking about. How to utilize the, the stuff that you have in your environment already, and you have these ideas in the back of your head. I'm willing to bet that you can come up with many other creative solutions that will work for the specific animals in your care, in the specific environment that you're operating in, because you're thinking about it in terms of, what is a snuffle mat type of thing? What is a scatter feeding type of thing? What is a puzzle game type of thing? How can I take what I have and turn it into one of these three types of foraging toys? So you really don't need expensive toys or tons of space or lots of time to make effective enrichment items, you can just do it with trash. I've spent a lifetime enriching animals with trash.

So how to do this today? Pick one game from each category. Set aside five to 10 minutes to make or put together the games from each category that we discussed today and observe your pet's response. How do they interact with it? Then adjust the difficulty and or the material you're using as needed.

tailor it to your pet based on how they interact with or respond to the stuff that you give them. Start simple. Don't try to get really fancy. If you're anything like me, I get, I see something, I get an idea, and then I get like 20 ideas, and then I wanna do them all. And then I spend eight hours on all my ideas.

And that kind of defeats the purpose. Um, because I am, I like, when I get enthusiastic about something, I go hard. But you know, edit yourself. Um, don't be me. Start simple. Rotate games to prevent boredom. So maybe try one game today, one the second game tomorrow, the third game day after tomorrow. And then assess the safety and the enjoyment of each activity for your dog and your environment or whatever species you're working with, Go forth and try it. Remember that your pet does not need a Pinterest worthy setup to benefit. Small, consistent effort wins because the best strategy is the one that you can do

[00:13:53] 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.