Games That Contribute To The Mental Stimulation Of Dogs
Dogs are intelligent animals that have a great ability to learn. His intellectual capacity resembles that of a two-year-old child. To keep a dog healthy and happy, it is necessary to provide good stimulation, both physical and mental. Next, we’ll show you how you can do this.
Benefits of Games for Dogs
Games that promote mental and olfactory stimulation in dogs have many life benefits for these animals:
- Reduce stress levels.
- Prevent boredom and destructive behaviors generated by lack of stimuli.
- Improve the bond between owner and pet.
- They release accumulated energy.
In addition to all these benefits, games are also a good option to pass the time on cold, rainy or very hot days, when we spend more time at home. So this kind of activity is especially useful now in times of social distance.
Mental stimulation games for dogs
Dogs are mentally capable enough to learn gestures and words, demonstrate a basic understanding of arithmetic, and are very good at studying the environment and locating resources. For this reason, there are many types of activities that we can try with them to take advantage of their canine qualities.
intelligence games
You can find many interactive pet games on the market, but you can also make them yourself. The most typical consists of a tray with holes to hide food. These openings have a lid that the dog should try to open with his mouth or paws.
Sometimes the mechanism works by turning, pulling, tilting or lifting. With practice, the dog will receive the prize in less and less time, so you can purchase several types of board and switch between them. This type of game stimulates the animal’s intelligence and memory.
Games to stimulate the smell
Smell is the most developed sense of dogs. We could say that they see the world with their nose, since more than 50% of their brain is dedicated to smell and they have more than 220 million olfactory cells, whereas humans have no more than 5 million. That’s why it’s essential to spend time playing games to stimulate your sense of smell on a daily basis.
To practice the games that stimulate the smell, we can put food hidden between old cloths that we have at home or spread it around the rooms, without the dog seeing us. As the animal enters the game dynamics, it is interesting to increase the difficulty, tying the cloths or using scent mats, for example.
seek games
We can hide food or hide and give the order to “search” for the dog to find us. With this game, we improve smell, calling and location. This is very useful when releasing the dog in the park or in the field.
Training
Training is a way to stimulate the dog’s intelligence. Thus, by teaching new commands, words and gestures, we improve communication with the pet.
Later, some commands will facilitate everyday situations, such as making our animal learn to sit and calm down when we go out to eat and take it with us or for it to come back if it gets lost.
A very useful command is to be quiet before starting to eat. With this command, we are indirectly working on the animal’s own self-control.
Mental stimulation of dogs: training
Sometimes physical training also works as mental stimulation, for example, when going through different obstacles and textures.
Using communication, trust and positive reinforcement, the dog will learn to get around the different obstacles by walking, zigzag, jumping, crouching…until he is able to get around them motivated only by our attention.
It is important to spend some time stimulating dogs with physical and mental games to keep them active, fit and happy. In addition, we must also not forget to always use the hit-reward method if we want learning to be a positive experience for them.
