The Best Enrichment for Your Dog and Cat Involves the Nose
Scent activities can be an important positive experience for your pet. Here's why, along with ideas to try with your dog or cat. Photos: Simonovich Inna and Luminoisty-images.com/both Shutterstock. By Zazie Todd, PhD One of the best ways to help ensure your dog or cat is happy is to give them opportunities to use their nose. These days, when we think about good animal welfare, we’re not just talking about preventing cruelty. It also means giving them plenty of opportunities to have positive experiences and engage in behaviours that are natural for the species. You won’t be at all surprised to learn that for dogs, opportunities to sniff are really important. After all, dogs have incredible noses. Dogs have such amazing noses that some of them are even trained to search for missing people, animal scat, truffles, or bacteria in a hospital setting. As Alexandra Horowitz writes in her delightfully informative book Being a Dog (p2), “Working dogs, trained to tell us what they naturally...