How to Know If Enrichment Is Actually Enriching

So, you want to provide enrichment for your pet or your clients’ pets. Awesome! Welcome. 

One of the questions we at Pet Harmony get asked frequently is, “How do I do it?” It seems easy at first: let your dogs sniff, give your birds something to shred, give your cats something to pounce on, and provide them with all food puzzles. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? But then you get in and start doing All The Things, and… nothing about the pet’s behavior changes. 

Or the behavior does change, but not in the way you expected it to. 

Or your clients don’t understand why they’re doing it and how it relates to why they hired you. 

Or the behavior changes exactly as you wanted it to, but you find over time that it isn’t enough, and you have to do more enrichment to get the same results. And more, and more, until you feel like enriching your pet is a full-time job, and you’re the one who’s stuck on a hamster wheel.

Or maybe everything was peachy keen before, and it’s still peachy keen now, and you’re wondering what even is the point of doing enrichment if it doesn’t seem to change anything?

Enrichment Is Defined By Its Outcomes

If any of those experiences sound familiar, you’re not alone. Enrichment is often misunderstood and talked about in ways that aren’t particularly helpful from an implementation standpoint, which can lead to a lot of confusion and frustration. This stems mainly from the fact that people often talk about toys and activities as if they are enrichment. But guess what? That’s not entirely accurate.

Now listen: I’m not talking trash here. I’m not saying that food puzzle companies or the creators of games and training protocols labeled as enrichment are lying to you. What I mean when I say that it’s “not entirely accurate” is that all of those things have the potential to be enriching, but we can’t actually know whether or not enrichment has happened until we do two things first:

1. Start off with a clearly defined goal, so we know exactly how we’re hoping an object or activity will improve an animal’s welfare and well-being.
2. Observe the outcomes for the animal we’re trying to enrich to see if the object or activity actually met that goal.

Make sense? Enrichment isn’t defined by the object or activity itself, but by the contingencies between the objects or activities and the outcomes.

So, the first step in knowing if enrichment is actually enriching is to know what we’re hoping to accomplish with an enrichment plan in clear, operationalized terms. The second step is to come up with a way to objectively measure how effective the enrichment plan was in accomplishing those goals.

Structured Flexibility

For a lot of people, the idea of having to have goals and metrics sounds high-key terrifying. I’ve had people tell me–

“I’m more of an intuitive person than an analytical person, so that’s not really how my brain works.”

“Even the sight of a spreadsheet makes me nauseated, so I could never do data collection.”

 “That just sounds so rigid and labor-intensive. My clients aren’t going to want to do all that work.”

–and countless other variations on that theme.

So let’s address those common concerns:

Both goal-setting and data collection can be simple and easy. They don’t need to be rigid and labor-intensive processes.

You don’t need to use spreadsheets if they don’t mesh with your neurotype, learning history, or preferences. There are lots of other ways to gather and organize information.

Intuition is welcome here! Being a science-based or evidence-based behavior professional doesn’t mean – and in fact shouldn’t mean – that we reject other ways of knowing. It means that we can assess when each way of knowing is the most appropriate to use in any given context, and we can use those ways of understanding to the most significant effect. If this concept intrigues you, here’s a great little video that explains it further. 

Taking a systematic approach to enrichment like this doesn’t only address the issues we discussed at the beginning of this article, it also helps us to be as efficient and effective as possible. It keeps us grounded and keeps things clear so we don’t get lost in the weeds of our own plans and ideas. 

My good friend and colleague Kelly Cordell-Morris says it’s like having a skeleton: it’s the structure that allows us to be flexible instead of just being a pile of goo.

Simple, But Effective

So, let’s look at the simplest goal and data collection I can think of:

Goal: Fun! Yes, that’s right! Fun can totally be the goal of an enrichment plan! Fun improves an individual’s well-being and can improve physical, behavioral, and/or emotional health, so fun is a totally reasonable enrichment goal.

Data collection: Use your eyeballs to see whether or not the animal is actually having fun. We can operationalize that to make it more objective, too! For a dog, we’d expect their overt behaviors to include:

• A loose, wiggly body
• A loose, wiggly wagging tail
• A lack of muscle tension in the face
• An open mouth with soft, c-curved commissures
• Depending on the kind of fun we might see high-back ears
• Depending on the kind of fun we might also hear laughter: a deep, huffing pant that usually happens with the tongue mostly or entirely still in the mouth

Of course, it can get more complex than that really quickly. What if you want a dog to have fun to relieve stress? Our data collection would need to get a little more involved than just observing body language.

What if you want a dog to have fun to relieve stress, but there’s a safety risk? Or a health risk? Or you don’t know what that dog actually enjoys? Or having fun seems to increase their stress rather than decreasing it?

We can still find the simplest, most effective way to accomplish this in a way that works for everyone involved! We just need to learn how to approach these situations using an enrichment framework. That’s what we’ll be doing in our upcoming KPA Live course, Is It Enriching? Make Your Behavior Change Plans Count.

In the meantime, you can watch this video of me showing you some of the super simple data collection I’ve done for my own pets and their enrichment plans. Hopefully, this will get your mind working about how you can do this for the animals in your care, too!