Appropriate and individualised enrichment during periods of enforced confinement or exercise restriction, either due to post-operative recovery or due to illness, can significantly decrease a dog’s stress and boredom levels.
Providing dog owners with appropriate alternative options for activities and entertainment for their dogs during enforced confinement or restricted exercise periods due to surgery, injury or illness can help increase owner compliance, reduce the risk of further injury or relapse, and aid in the recovery of the dog.
My sister’s dog recently underwent surgery on both elbow joints. The veterinary surgeon’s post-operative instructions were to keep him confined to a small, penned area with no exercise other than toilet breaks initially, building gradually over a 12-week period to short on-lead walks of increasing distance and duration. With an extremely lively and exuberant adolescent dog, my sister, like many owners, found this period of restricted exercise exceptionally difficult.
Even calmer or older dogs can find extended confinement stressful, adding to the inevitable stress caused by surgery and time spent at the veterinary clinic as well as the potential pain and incapacity. Thus, recovery can be easily impacted and could potentially lead to a negative emotional state and subsequent behavioural challenges.
What is enrichment?
Enrichment can be defined as meeting all of an animal’s needs as closely as possible to how they would be met in their natural environment, in order to empower them to engage in species-typical behaviours in healthy and appropriate ways (Bender and Strong, 2019).
Enrichment, therefore, is an essential part of a dog’s everyday life but becomes even more important when they are unable to move about freely, exercising and exploring in a way they normally would on their walks or within their home or garden environment.
Studies have shown the provision of enrichment activities for dogs can have a significant positive impact on behaviour. Environmental enrichment provision for dams and puppies during pregnancy and early life can mitigate the risk of behavioural problems in adult dogs (Majecka et al., 2020). Duranton and Horowitz (2019) found that scent-work types of enrichment created a positive cognitive bias. It has even been demonstrated that the provision of enrichment prevented the transgenerational transmission of negative state behaviour symptoms in adult male mice and their offspring (Gapp et al., 2016).
Further, some of the benefits shown in kennelled dogs include decreased stress, anxiety and fear-induced aggression, as well as helping to promote stress resilience in general (Zilocchi et al., 2018; Willen et al., 2019). Given that an imposed confinement period will inevitably be stressful for most dogs, enrichment provision can help minimise that stress thus aiding recovery, improving welfare and helping owners through a difficult time.
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