Playtime for Service Dogs

Early interactions begin with your dog, create a healthy understanding of life with humans, and the other pet(s) you have at home or your family, friends, and neighbors will be important parts of a Service Dog’s life. Enrichment is vital for each of our puppies and service dogs; the stimulation physically and mentally keeps the dogs happy and exercised!

What do we mean by enriching interactions? Challenging our puppy with different ways of eating and playing with muffin pans, moving puzzle treat boards, and enrichment snacks like Kongs filled with kibble and interactive toys and games like the muffin tin game and interactive feeders. Non-food-related enrichment examples include canine scent, massage, and music.

Interactive Toys

MobilityDog things it to save some of their kibbles to feed in an interactive toy food dispensing toys that can be as easy as a maze bowl or as difficult as a puzzle. Interactive toys are toys that give something back once they solve the mental puzzle of releasing the food!

Things from the Kitchen

One of the games that our puppy raisers have so much fun with our curious wee puppies is the Muffin Game! A muffin tin from your kitchen and some tennis balls. Put a few kibbles and tennis balls in each cupcake space! Dogs of all ages enjoy finding the kibbles and chasing the discarded tennis balls as they hunt for the food!

Hiding smells like birch in tea holders, hiding the scent somewhere around your home. When you say seek, your dog will hunt it down!

Let’s play music to our pups - Sounds.

Mental stimulation. SD Beckett swooned whenever they went to the opera or played cello music on the record player in our founder's home! All dogs really enjoy hearing calming music or audiobooks. It is great for young dogs to continue their exposures to fireworks, loud sudden noises, overhead speakers at grocery stores introducing them to known and unknown sounds of the world!

Remember to keep the volumes low for our canines! Starsky.com, a hearing aid company, shares that dogs have a keen sense of hearing and hear better than we do. Dogs can hear nearly twice as many frequencies as humans. They can also hear sounds four times further away, so what human ears can hear from 20 feet away; our dogs can hear from 80 feet away.

Toys to StuffStuffed Kongs are a great form of enrichment you can do at home. One option is to use some soaked kibble in the Kong. Freezing the Kongs can make them more challenging for your dog.

Outdoor Play and Exercise

Since we cannot bring our dogs to the dog parks, it is the Handler’s responsibility to have our dogs still get exercise. Think of your dog’s playtime as both their cardio and your own! Getting outbreaks up the day is good for both’ and humans’ mental health and wellness.

Going for walks with your dog is getting trickier because of the current Pandemic, so we need to be more clever! Early early morning, always willing to go another direction if the area is too congested. While a walk is always fun to get out and about, it is still another stimulating event to do a walk-in in your apartment, home, or garage!

A word about food And play

Maintaining a proper weight is critical for the health of every dog. At, MobilityDog we use some of their daily kibbles for treating, tasking, and socialization.

If you do want to give your dog additional treats, they should be limited. Treats we recommend include Real Meat, Natural Balance food roll, Blue Buffalo Blue Bits, Primal freeze-dried liver, and Kiwi.

AND please remember, a dog should not play on a FULL tummy! Let them sleep and chill out as their food digests. Running and playing hard on a full tummy can be life-threatening to our dogs.

Playing with your dog Play isn’t just a fun part of living with your dog. It’s actually an essential feature of how we all stay emotionally and physically healthy. So both your physical and social well-being needs to play with your dog daily.

Of course, the games you play depend on whether you have a cat or a dog, and if you have a dog, what type of dog you have. Poodles like to seek, Retrievers like to retrieve, Collies like chasing, and Hounds like to use their nose to follow scents and find their toys. And of course, many dogs enjoy tugging and chewing toys and playing hide and seek with you outdoors.

Feeding dogs should also be more of a game than simply filling a food bowl. Use some of your pet’s daily rations as rewards in regular training sessions, either to teach obedience in dogs or even to teach your cat some tricks, such as rolling over and playing dead.

Place a proportion of your dog’s food in special foraging toys, available in all good pet stores, and hide them in different locations around your home every day. Your pet will have to seek out the toy and then manipulate it to obtain their food. It’s a much more challenging, stimulating, and rewarding prospect than simply visiting the food bowl.

Above all, whatever game you play, have fun. Play is essential to your dog throughout its whole life! In fact, playing with your dog is just so much fun!

It also offers great health benefits, encouraging your dog to be active, keep supple and maintain a sleek body condition. Just remember to keep toys out of sight between dog playtime sessions. Their reappearance is met with enthusiasm. Please avoid using your fingers or toes as toys; we never want you to be your dog's favorite chew toy!