The Need for Enrichment Tools in a Shelter Environment

As hard as we try to make a dog's stay at our shelter a positive experience, the fact is, we can’t compete with a home environment.  Dogs spend long hours alone in their kennels and don’t get as many opportunities to keep their minds as active as we would like. We strive to keep their stay with us as short as possible, but we are always looking for new ways to make their time with us more enjoyable.

Shelters such as ours have incredibly caring staff and volunteers who take care of our dogs. The dogs are fed, cleaned up after and socialized/walked every day, yet we still wanted to find ways to make their time in the kennels more enjoyable.  We provide comfy blankets and give them toys to play with, but what the dogs really like are food based items such as toys filled with peanut butter or chew sticks. For some dogs, this is ok, but others will guard these items when we try to retrieve them or bury them in the blankets, creating a mess as well as a potentially dangerous situation for an unsuspecting volunteer or staff member.  So the question became, how do we safely increase a dog’s enrichment opportunities while keeping them and staff/volunteers safe?  One solution for us has been the Treat Clincher by BarkerFun.

There are several reasons we like the Treat Clincher. First, by keeping the “chew item” stationary, we no longer have to wonder if there are any highly valued items hiding in the kennel. We can monitor exactly what is in the kennel and safely retrieve it when needed. Secondly, this greatly reduces the risk of our dogs choking on a splinter. We only use highly durable items in the Clincher and we can see exactly when we need to change out or remove the item. Third, the Treat Clincher allows us to provide all of our dogs enrichment opportunities even when staff and volunteers are busy doing other things. And last, but not least, the durability of the Treat Clincher is incredibly important. Having a tool that breaks when used just creates more potential danger for our dogs. The Treat Clincher’s sturdy design means we don’t need to worry about our dogs ingesting a piece of plastic from a broken unit.

In addition to the positive results we get from using the Treat Clincher in our shelter, using it in foster homes (as well as in pet owners homes) provides equally beneficial results. When fostering a dog, we don't know much about how they will act in our house, so we want to keep an eye on them, but this can be a challenge without putting them in a crate. A Treat Clincher keeps our dogs where our foster parents can keep an eye on them while allowing them to still go about their day.

The BarkerFun Treat Clincher is an important part of our enrichment program. It allows us to customize the care we provide our dogs to make their stay with us as positive as possible. We feel this is a must have in our organization.