Enrichment

Enrichment, or environmental enrichment, is mental and physical stimulation for the animals in our care to keep them active and happy! While in a kennel animals can become stressed and it can impact their health- enrichment is essential to an animal's quality of life at the shelter and it has a huge impact on their behavior. 

Some enrichment activities include Kongs gilled with kibble an peanut butter, lick mats, smell strips and activity boxes. Play groups are another form of enrichment that can be done during normal Dog TLC shifts- these provide dogs with socialization as well as mental and physical stimulation.

There is an enrichment calendar that our AmeriCorps member and volunteer coordinator put together to take the guesswork out of these activities. It’s located on the whiteboard outside the enrichment room** and there’s a sheet in the enrichment room on the wall. In addition, we have a binder, as well as some documents and videos below that describe enrichment for our dogs and cats at the bottom of this page. 

 

If you would like to be shown how to do the enrichment activities, so that when you come out, you can do all the enrichment for the animals that day, email our AmeriCorps member or our Volunteer Coordinator and they will work out a time to show you. 

 

Some Reminders:

• Please clean and disinfect any surfaces you touch after you are through. If you aren’t using disposable knives please either put them in the cleaning area or wash them yourself! 
• NOTE: any lick mats you put into the kennels for enrichment have to be supervised. Dogs have a tendency to shred and/or eat them and this can cause problems that we don’t need to create for our vet techs!