We all heard of the pup who wants to play for hours and hours a day. One of our dogs, Goomba, fits this description. If we let him, he’d be playing fetch, tug, and destroying toys from when he woke up to when he falls asleep from exhaustion.

Fortunately for us, there’s more than one way to tire out your pup. Canine enrichment toys are a fantastic way to enrich your dog and work their brain instead of their body. These “brain games” will challenge your pup differently than physical activity, allowing you to tire out their mind and their body at the same time. By using canine enrichment toys, you can help keep your dog happy, healthy, and away from problem behaviors, such as chewing your shoes when you’re not home.

You can mentally enrich your dog in countless ways, but what follows is a list of our favorite canine enrichment toys that we’ve had success with Goomba and Prim.

Why is enrichment important for dogs?

Enrichment, whether it is mental enrichment or food-based enrichment, is important for every dog, not just anxious dogs. By allowing our dogs to use their brains, we encourage them to engage in behavior specific to dogs. The part we love is being able to watch our dogs try to solve a problem by using various behaviors, like pawing or nosing, until they find out what works.

To start off, a properly enriched dog is less likely to display undesirable behaviors. We’ve all heard different versions of the saying “a tired dog is a good dog.” We agree, but think a better version of this saying is “a tired and enriched dog is a good dog”. Canine enrichment toys won’t solve all your behavior problems, but if your dog isn’t bored, you’re less likely to have to dog proof a fence or deal with inappropriate chewing. Goomba was a little hellion when we adopted him, but after we provided him appropriate ways to direct his energy, he’s turned into the perfect house dog.

If you’d like more information on how to use enrichment to reduce undesirable behaviors, check out one of our favorite pet resources, VCA Animal Hospitals. They are our first resource for questions related to dog health.

Proper enrichment can also help reduce anxiety-based behaviors. Addressing this directly, your pup isn’t going to stop having separation anxiety because you gave them a frozen Kong. However, with some work and proper planning, you can use canine enrichment toys to teach them that some situations aren’t as bad as they think. For example, if your dog doesn’t like their crate, food-based enrichment is a vital part of how we create trained our dogs. Both of our dogs go willingly to their crates as soon as we ask and Prim even enjoys sunbathing and napping in hers.

Besides improving your pups’ behavior, canine enrichment toys are fun for your dog! As long as you don’t make it a negative experience, enrichment will be a great time for your pup. Almost every dog enjoys interacting with their humans and you’ll get to improve your bond with your dog. We love watching our dogs learn new behaviors, whether they are new tricks or new ways of interacting with their world. If you’re reading this guide, you probably feel the same way!

Getting started with canine enrichment activities

If you’re just getting started with canine enrichment, we wanted to provide some advice to help keep things smooth and fun for everyone involved. If you’re an old hat, this section probably won’t help you as much and we recommend jumping to our favorite canine enrichment toys!

We recommend starting off with higher value treats than you think you need. High-value treats will help keep your pup engaged while they are trying to figure out how a new object works. One of our favorites is Stewart freeze-dried beef liver (Amazon) and our pups are always super motivated when it comes out. Even just mixing a few high-value treats in to a new toy will help keep them motivated and engaged with a new canine enrichment toy. If your dog isn’t very food motivated, try doing their food-based enrichment before their normal meal time when they are more likely to be hungry.

Starting off with easier options and advancing slowly will give your pup the best chance for success. Giving your pup a DIY dog puzzle that is way too hard will not be a positive experience for you or your dog. We recommend starting with easier puzzles or lowering the difficulty of a puzzle until your pup understands the concept. We don’t get bonus points for having the dog who completes the hardest puzzle. The goal of enrichment is to have fun with your dog. Advancing slowly and starting with a reasonable difficulty level will help make sure it stays this way.

Finally, we recommend storing your canine enrichment toys when not in use. Scarcity will make them more special when they come out, which will help maintain your dog’s interest. It’s a simple modification that will help keep the activities as fun as possible for both you and your dog.

Our favorite canine enrichment toys

There are a million different options for indoor enrichment activities for dogs. We won’t be able to get through them all, but our goal is to provide a list of our favorite canine enrichment toys that our dogs love! Every dog is different, but in our experience, the vast majority of dogs will love at least some of these options.

Some of these options will also be on the list of our favorite games to play inside with our dogs, too! Check out that post if you’re looking for more interactive enrichment for your dog.

Kongs

Kongs are one of our favorite canine enrichment toys and make a great option as enrichment toys for older dogs! Kongs are a snowman shaped piece of durable rubber that has a small hole at the top and a larger one on the bottom. The middle of the Kong is hollow, which allows you to put all kinds of treats inside to entertain your dog. The shape allows for erratic movement, which helps keep your pup more engaged than predictable movement patterns.

Kongs has a variety of different options available, but our favorite is the Kong Extreme that we bought from Chewy. We’ve had the large (both of our dogs are 80 lbs) for years and it’s still holding up well despite Goomba doing his best to chew through it! Unless you have an extremely gentle chewer, we highly recommend the Kong Extreme because of its increased durability for a few dollars more.

Cleaning can be a little more difficult because of the shape, but Kongs are dishwasher-safe. We use a combination of dishwashing, soaking, and a bottle brush depending on how messy the treat is. They’ve worked great for us for years.

We recommend figuring out a system to hold up the Kong while it’s being filled and freezing. Initially, we used a combination of painter’s tape and a plastic cup, but better options exist. Our favorite is this Kong holder and plug, which will really make your life easier. You can put almost any dog safe food in your Kong, but we recommend starting with some of our frozen Kong recipes! Freezing your Kong gives you many more options for filling and extends the duration dramatically. We even used our (frozen) Kongs to help harness training our dogs, and it worked great!

Lick mats

Licks are one of our favorite options for enrichment, especially if you’re just getting started. We love them because they’re cheap, durable, and are easy to clean. Your dog will love them because it’s easy for even less motivated pups to get excited about the treat. You can put almost anything on a lick mat, but blending is always an option, too! We wrote two separate guides on lick mat recipes, lick mat recipes and frozen lick mat recipes.

Our first lick mat we purchased was the Messy Mutts Silicone licking mat. It’s held up great over the years, even with Goomba’s frustrated chewing. It’s dishwasher-safe, durable, and lasts a long time. We highly recommend it, especially if you prefer shopping on Amazon.

Our current favorite is Frisco’s silicone lick mats, 2 pack from Chewy. They’re extremely cheap, durable, easy to store, and dishwasher-safe. Either way, you can’t go wrong and we still use both all the time!

Lick mats are one first types of canine enrichment toys we used with our dogs. Years ago, one of our dogs, Goomba, tore both of his CCLs (dog ACLs, essentially) and had to get surgery. Between waiting for surgery and recovery from it, he had varying degrees of mobility restrictions for the better part of a year. We used lick mats daily during this period to help give him some activities he could do that didn’t involve moving around.

If you want to learn our tips and tricks, check out our guide on recovery from CCL surgery to make both your and your dog’s life easier during this period.

Long-lasting chews

Long-lasting chews are a great option if you’re looking for (you guessed it!) long-lasting canine enrichment toys! Depending on your dog’s preferences, there is an enormous variety of options available to choose from. Our dogs seem to go through phases of which chew they prefer the most and even come back to some of the older ones again after a while.

Our dogs’ first favorites were Nylabone Original Chews, which are great options to try first. They’re commonly available, last a long time, and aren’t too expensive. We ended up finding our first antlers at our local Aldi and our pups loved them! We had some issues finding them there again, so we ended up getting Whitetail Naturals Antlers from Amazon! Our dogs love these, too, and we recommend getting the whole antler instead of halves, even though they are more expensive.

Some folks say they’ve had issues with their dog’s teeth cracking if they chew too vigorously on hard objects, like antlers. We’ve used ours for years and have had no issues, but every dog is different!

If you’re looking for something different, there are other options like yak cheese and bully sticks. We don’t have any experience with yak chews, but our dogs love bully sticks! Our favorite is the Red Barn Naturals Bully Sticks Party Pack, but that’s mostly because they are of good quality and on the cheaper side. Recently, we’ve been using Chewy’s Bones & Chews bully sticks, because they’re more affordable and we’re trying to get Prim to lose a little weight. She’s not happy about it, but we’re making progress!

Puzzle boards

Puzzle boards are a fantastic option for pups who want their minds to be challenged. For these canine enrichment toys, we recommend using higher value treats (like Stewart freeze-dried beef liver) unless your dog is extremely food motivated. This will help keep your pup engaged with the puzzle board, especially if you’re still in the learning phase. We like to engage our pups’ minds as much as we can because we find it rewarding to watch their doggy gears turn when they’re trying to figure out a new challenge.

There is an enormous variety of puzzle boards that’s perfect for providing an endless amount of challenges for your dog. They’re typically cheap and we snagged a lot of ours from our local discount stores (TJ Maxx & HomeGoods are our local options). Our first puzzle board (and one of our dogs’ favorites) is this Nina Ottosson brick puzzle board from Amazon. We like the Outward Hound options, as all the ones we’ve used have been relatively easy to clean.

We wrote a guide to our favorite DIY dog puzzles with links to pre-made options, too. We highly recommend it, especially if you’re just getting started with puzzles. Two of our dogs’ favorites are the puzzle box and the cardboard activity box!

Snuffle mats

Snuffle mats are our most often used of these canine enrichment toys and our pups go crazy for them! Depending on your dog’s level of food motivation, you can even use regular dry kibble for them. All you’ll need to do is throw the kibble on the mat and let your dog go sniffing. If you want to make the snuffle mat a little more challenging, you can tuck the kibble under the pieces of fabric.

We use snuffle mats daily and they are a fantastic tool to help your dog overcome fears. For us, Prim was uncomfortable with the washing machine, especially when it’s not loaded evenly because of a heavy blanket. We started using our snuffle mats during the louder parts of the wash cycle on a different floor behind a door. Over time, we could move the snuffle mat to be against the washer. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the process resulted in Prim thinking the washing machine was a positive experience that resulted in kibble.

There are a few different routes you can go with snuffle mats. We use our DIY snuffle mats the most often and they were less than $15. Check out the link for a guide on how to make your own. If you’re not into that and just want to buy one, our recommendation is the Pet Parents Forager Snuffle Mat from Amazon. We highly recommend it and it’s only slightly more expensive than making your own!

Slow feeders

Slow feeders are fantastic canine enrichment toys, especially if you’re just getting started with enrichment for your dog. Typically, slow feeders are designed to extend your dog’s mealtime, which is great if your pup likes to gobble down their kibble as fast as possible. Slow feeders are a fun way to turn your dog’s 15 second mealtime into a few minute long enrichment session without additional work.

There are two different styles of slow feeders that are the most common. The easiest to use (and cheapest) are dog bowl inserts, which typically suction to your dog’s bowl. These function as obstacles for your dog to work around while eating. The most common of these are silicone dog bowl inserts, which are great if you don’t want to store another dog bowl.

The second style is a standalone option that functions without other equipment. There is an enormous variety to choose from, but most function the same. Our current favorites are Lickin Layers by Outward Hound and Pet Parents Forager Dog Bowl. Lickin Layers is more of a traditional design, but turned into a puzzle with multiple layers for your pup. The Forager Dog Bowl is essentially a small snuffle mat that you can use to feed your dog from. Both are great options and you can’t go wrong with either option.

Toppls

Toppls are our dogs’ favorite canine enrichment toys (at least currently!). We’re big fans, too! To start, Toppls are surprisingly durable and much easier to clean than other similar devices, like Kongs. We also like how they’re designed better, too. They have a wider opening, which will help keep your dog motivated and decrease the likelihood of frustrated biting. The wider opening makes cleaning significantly easier than the smaller opening of the Kong. To top(pl) it off, they’re dishwasher-safe, too! (I’m sorry about that pun, but not sorry enough to remove it).

Toppls give a similar level of flexibility as Kongs in what you can use to fill them. The bowl shaped design means you don’t need to blend ingredients, unless that helps your dog stay motivated. You can throw whatever you want in it, as long as it’s dog safe. Check out our favorite frozen Toppl recipes. Our dogs’ favorite is the wet food mixture and peanut butter and banana!

We also highly recommend the Toppl Stopper, also made by West Paw. It makes life so much easier since it seals the hole and holds the Toppl upright when filling. They’re also extremely easy to clean and come in an amusing design, too. They are typically less than $10, which makes it a cheap way to make your life easier.

Treat dispensers

Treat dispensers are a good low-cost option to try canine enrichment toys out with your pup. Treat dispensers are readily available at any store that sells dog supplies, and they come in an almost infinite number of designs. They all have the same principle, though; your dog has to move the toy to get the rewards to come out.

The first treat dispenser that we purchased was the Pet Zone IQ treat ball, which is great because it’s easy to clean and easy to adjust the difficulty level to match your dog’s needs. It’s one of the more common options and we see it, or at least a similar design, at every pet store we go to. Another of our favorites is the Starmark Bob-A-Lot. It moves differently than most toys, gives you the option to adjust the difficulty, but isn’t as easy to clean as some others.

Some dogs are less motivated initially and may require some additional help to get the idea of your new canine enrichment toys. Fortunately, this is extremely easy. You can easily change the reward until your dog is interested! For us, Primmie shows interest with kibble, but Goomba sometimes requires something more enticing. Your dog’s favorite food is a great place to start, but we have had a lot of luck with Stewart’s freeze-dried beef liver. Our dogs’ love it, and it really turns up their motivation on days when they need an assist.

Conclusion

Our dogs love all the canine enrichment toys in this list, but they have their favorites. Prim’s favorite is the snuffle mat and Goomba’s favorite is the Toppl. Don’t be afraid to get creative with the Kong, Toppl, and lick mats! Our dogs love some of the weird combinations, like peanut butter and chicken.

What are your dog’s favorite canine enrichment toys? We love to hear new ideas for enrichment and our pups love to try them! Show us your favorite by tagging us @TheRulyBully on Instagram.

Have fun!