One of the latest trends in the dog world is the creation of neighborhood, for profit, playgrounds for dogs. Basically, an amusement park for dogs.
This is the evolution of the enrichment fad that took off a few years ago. Enrichment started out as a strategy to help captive animals in zoos to prevent behavioral disturbances. Instead of living in cement cages, they were transferred to artificial habitats that allowed them to express more of their natural, and necessary, survival behaviors. That eventually leaked out into people providing more activities for their dogs.
It started getting to the point of ridiculousness about 4 years ago. Now dogs were being put in daycares and given ongoing useless activities all day while the owners were at work. Now the dogs were tearing apart cardboard boxes, doing facsimiles of things that service dogs do (such as opening drawers), puzzles, agility, rally, new toys, group play, useless scent work, and such.
The dogs I met that were in these programs became flat in their obedience. That is because self-reward became more valuable than working with the owner. So, ask the dog to do this or that, and it was sluggish at best. That’s dangerous when a dog must obey in an emergency. We also started hearing about giving dogs “agency” by the purely positive cult. To them, every activity the dog does has to be self-rewarding and that goal overrides anything the owner wants to or needs their dog to do.
Now we have these new indoor amusement park stores popping up in retail areas. Yes, they are offering additional services, such as basic training, grooming, food and supplies.
I don’t like the concept one bit. I don’t like what I’m seeing. The board and train programs are ultimately and often focused on using compulsion in the end since they now must force the dogs to do things that good training would get the dogs to want to do.
I think this is the same disturbing trend we see with helicopter parents. We now see articles where parents are attending job interviews with their college age offspring. These kids never grew up to be normal kids. Their lives were packed with activities and participation trophies from waking to sleep, every day of the week. Have you been around kids that can’t be told to do anything without getting back a tantrum? Do you think today’s kids are doing well? Studies don’t reflect that. These same motivations are now happening to our dogs, since for some, their dogs are now their kids. A good home for a dog isn’t a playground.
Whatever happened to having a normal kid raised as a normal kid? And a normal dog to grow up to be a normal dog?
You mess with nature, guess how that turns out?
Now, I should say, I don’t have a problem with parents taking their kids to amusement parks. But it is another thing if that is all the children did, all day long, every day. I do have a problem with is putting a dog in that environment day after day, year-round. It backfires, in my opinion. A dog that is primarily immersed in a highly stimulating environment that is focused on self-reward, useless tasks, and artificial in environment, is going to have problems. It might not appear that way at first, but to my eyes, it is all wrong. No wild animal lives in such a world. This type of thing has never been done to pets before, and in my observation, I don’t like what I’m seeing.
Plan accordingly.