Mental health enrichment isn't just for humans, it's for dogs too
Why a bored, misbehaving dog is the dog owner's fault 99% of the time
The first time I heard the group of dogs howling and barking, I checked my surroundings. It was already cold and icy outside. The last thing I needed was to fall on a frigid, winter ground in Chicago while holding the leashes of a Shih Tzu mix and a Dachshund/Hound mix, two dogs who would definitely respond to loose dogs around them. I’d already been in this same neighborhood and dodged one loose Pit and another unidentified dog on the train tracks.
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Why was I here? I was spending the holidays in my childhood neighborhood. Growing up, I could count the number of loose dogs I spotted on one hand. It never occurred to me that this dog walk would be any different. I moved away and, for some peculiar reason, returned to entirely too many irresponsible dog owners. (To be fair, my then-crabby next-door neighbor had two dogs who would constantly run away and a third dog who had a dirt-digging crush on my childhood dog, so this wasn’t completely new to me.)
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But these howling, barking dogs seemed different. Although I couldn’t see them while standing near their fence, from across the street, I could spot a back deck. Occasionally, one of those dogs would stroll up to the deck, look around and come back down.
According to a neighbor, the owners never let the dogs in the house no matter how cold it was or how bad the weather was, and she was scared to call the police because she didn’t want the reckless homeowners to sic their dogs on her only dog. It seemed like one dog may have had puppies, and the first homeowner decided to keep all of the dogs but not take any steps to train them.
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Generally, I have a “more dogs, the merrier” perspective but only when they’re reasonably trained. I pondered on the worried neighbor’s dilemma. A bored dog is often a stressed dog. Multiply that by three (or four or five), and you’re definitely going to have a troubled backyard of dogs — who may even attack each other to pass the time.
While the irresponsible dog owner may just think “that’s how dogs are” and accuse the neighbor of being meddlesome, I’d only been there for a couple of nights and noticed the same problems — mainly the constant howling and barking throughout the day and night. Mental health for dogs and enrichment helps redirect that “bad dog” energy into positive outlets, reducing anxiety, quieting the dogs down and preventing a frustrating household (and irritated neighbors).