Boredom Busters for Dogs: 40 Tail-Wagging Games and Adventures
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About this ebook
Nikki Moustaki
Nikki Moustaki is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry and the author of The Bird Market of Paris: A Memoir and The Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry. She has written for Good Housekeeping, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, the Miami Herald, and the Village Voice, among others. She holds an MA in poetry from New York University, an MFA in poetry from Indiana University, and an MFA in fiction from New York University. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks. She splits her time between Miami Beach and New York City.
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Boredom Busters for Dogs - Nikki Moustaki
Enriching Your Dog’s Life
In the mid-1990s, zookeepers at the Central Park Zoo in New York City noticed that their 700-pound male polar bear, Gus, seemed to be coming unhinged. Gus swam back and forth in his small pool day after day, for hours on end, in continuous figure eights. It was obvious to both zoo visitors and zookeepers that something was desperately wrong with the bear. Not knowing how to respond to Gus’s apparent unhappiness, the zoo hired an animal behaviorist to study Gus and try to resolve his problems.
The verdict? Years of life in captivity had turned the poor bear neurotic, which had led him to exhibit obsessive and compulsive behaviors, probably to prevent himself from going out of his fluffy polar bear mind. Quite simply, Gus was in desperate need of something interesting to do.
The animal behaviorist recommended that the zoo implement enrichment activities for Gus and enhance his environment in ways that would stimulate some of his natural tendencies and break his neurotic patterns. Zookeepers installed a polar-bear-entertaining whirlpool and gave Gus interactive toys. They started offering him food in packages he had to open, hid other food around the habitat for him to track down, and froze fish in giant blocks of ice for him to break into. Gus appeared to be thrilled with the new additions to his home and daily life. He stopped his neurotic swimming pattern as he learned to play and forage as he would have in the wild. This is what pet enrichment is all about: keeping an animal active and engaged in his environment by offering him activities to stimulate natural behaviors.
As Gus so aptly demonstrated, lack of enrichment can cause stress, anxiety, and boredom, leading to problems. In your dog, they can include such behaviors as inappropriate elimination, excessive barking, and furniture dismantlement. It’s a recipe for dogsaster that can end with a trip to the local shelter or a classified ad: Take my puppy, please!
Many of these problems can be solved by adding enriching activities to your dog’s life. This book explores some simple ways to provide your dog with stimulating environmental enrichment to keep him happy, healthy, and out of trouble. If enrichment can work for a bored polar bear in the Central Park Zoo, it can certainly work for the