Interview with Andrea Viveiros on Enrichment
Interview conducted by: Stephanie Keesey-Phelan, Ph.D., BCBA, CSAT, CCUI, FFCT
At DBI we believe that no person, no family, and certainly no dog trainer or behaviorist is an island. If you read our blog regularly, you already know that we believe that if you are a behavior analyst by profession, you are not your dog’s behavior analyst. But you may not know that we often collaborate with other dog training professionals to increase our knowledge and skills, and when we are working with a client whose behavioral presentation falls beyond our scope or expertise. Collaboration with other qualified professionals is a huge part of our work. It allows us to provide the most ethical and effective treatment for the dogs we work with, and also helps us build a wonderful community committed to making lives better for dogs and their people.
To that end, we are expanding our blog to include interviews with some of the amazing professionals who we collaborate with and who work with dogs across a variety of settings and locations. Our goal in doing this is to introduce you, our readers, to people who work in a variety of areas in the dog world but who share a common mission of increasing your dog’s welfare.
This month it is my pleasure to introduce you to Andrea Viveiros, KPA CTP, FFCP owner of Connect the Dogs. Andrea is a truly stellar dog trainer and behavior professional who I first met through Ran. What always strikes me about Andrea is her endless enthusiasm for all things dog behavior! She has a wonderful way of making dog behavior and, in the case of our interview today, enrichment accessible and connecting it to the bigger picture of dog welfare. Enrichment is a critical concept in how we care for dogs and something that we always consider here at DBI. I came out of our conversation with tons of ideas both for DBI clients and my own pup Kerby. I know you are going to love it!
Tell our readers a bit about yourself. How did you decide that you wanted to work with animals (and dogs in particular)?
I went to college for film production and was working in my school’s IT department. Towards the end of my time there I realized I needed a part-time job because the job couldn't continue after graduation, and it was 2011 when the job market was still terrible. I found a job at a local independent pet store via Craigslist, and kept working there through my last semester and just really fell in love with it. From there, I sought out a job as a dog walker for a company in my neighborhood, and then was lucky enough to start apprenticing under the really great positive reinforcement based trainer that was teaching classes at the pet store. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn, and just fell deeper and deeper into this until I ended up working in animal shelters. As shelter staff we were stretched thin and did all of the things, which was super eye opening after coming from a place where I was working with animals that were living in homes with full-time caregivers. I was kind of seeing the other side of the spectrum, and learning how to do the best with what we had.
I wanted to go back to dog training after burning out of the shelter because behavior was the underlying passion that brought me into sheltering in the first place. Sheltering is where I feel like I really got to thrive and expand, but coming back to work primarily with dogs and dog training felt like a good way to narrow my scope back down instead of trying to take on everything. This felt like a sustainable way to be able to contribute to the overall animal welfare community: helping keep dogs in their homes by providing accessible behavior support.
Tell us more about where you work now and what your role is?
I own my own training business called Connect the Dogs (I always love a good play on words).
I offer private coaching and behavior consulting virtually (everywhere) and in person in the Boston area. My role is all of the roles because, you know, as a small business owner, we do it all: training, marketing, panicking, accounting, etc…
What special interests do you have within your field?
I ruminate on this question often: what is my niche? What do I want to really focus on in terms of training? I just don't have an answer because I love to learn about all things. I love to just continue expanding my knowledge even if I don't have any plans to put it into practice. I love being able to connect what might seem like disparate pieces of information from different niches and figure out how they fit into other pictures.
I am very interested in finding creative and innovative ways to move the general public's mindset more in the positive reinforcement direction. So how can we as a community bring people along and motivate them? What is our role as behavior professionals in the broader animal welfare community? What is the impact that we can have with our skills and our resources to help other people who are working towards the same goal?
I’m always keeping in contact with my friends from the shelter world, learning about the challenges that they're experiencing, and how things have changed since I left. I try to make connections with vets offices and see how we can work together to best serve pets and their people. I’m always interested in how we can collaborate in a way that will benefit the community. I think it is really important to make and nurture those connections because we can’t do it alone. We as behavior professionals can't address these kinds of intertwined crises that come up, we have to do it with other professionals.
I know one area and topic that is important to you as a behavior professional is enrichment. Can you tell our readers what is enrichment?
Different sources use different words, but to me they kind of all articulate the same general concept: meeting the animals’ needs. So in the case of a dog, meeting a dog’s needs and providing safe opportunities for them to perform species-typical behaviors.
Why did you become interested in enrichment (and why do you want to talk to me about it today?)
I was first introduced to the concept of enrichment while working in the shelter, where we focused mostly on environmental enrichment for all the different species in our care. We also did a lot of DIY activities with the dogs specifically, which I was excited to bring forward into my training practice when I got back into this side of the field.
I wanted to talk about it today because I think it’s such a critical piece of living a fulfilling and harmonious life with our dogs, and one that’s unfortunately sometimes overlooked or treated as an afterthought instead of the backbone I believe it is.
Do you find your clients come to you with an understanding of enrichment? Is this a new concept for the folks you work with?
I think more and more on our end we’re seeing clients that want to support their dogs versus fix their dogs, and an enrichment framework aligns well with that goal. If someone isn’t familiar with the concept already, I really try to convey an understanding of what enrichment is and how it plays a role in our dogs’ lives– it’s not just like, a super fun added bonus, it’s critical to overall wellness.
How does enrichment come into play in your work with your clients? / Do you see enrichment (or lack thereof) play a role in challenging behaviors with dogs?
With my clients I start by investigating the full enrichment picture for their dog. It’s the first step to all my behavior plans. The vast majority of behavior challenges that people are experiencing with their dogs are due to or compounded by an underlying unmet need. Historically when we think of a dog’s needs, we’re maybe not thinking about what the totality of that can really mean. Pet Harmony put out a really great list of 14 categories of enrichment to think about which include: health and veterinary care, hygiene, nutrition, physical exercise, sensory stimulation, safety, security, species-typical behaviors (this is different depending on what species you’re working with, but for dogs it’s things like licking, chewing, digging, etc.), foraging, social interaction, mental stimulation, calming, independence, and environment. And then the additional layer that underlies all of those is: does the dog have agency in all of these categories?
I start with this great framework they’ve provided because it encompasses some things we might consider more obvious to take into account when starting a behavior plan. Some examples include: pain which is covered under the category health and veterinary care; and amount and quality of rest which is in the categories of safety and security. But this framework also encourages us to consider some things that are less discussed or less obvious. One example would be gut health and dietary variety - is the dog eating the same food every day or do they get different food experiences? We might consider the traction, stability, and different surfaces the dog moves on, and what kind of community they have. Are they with one person all the time? Do they have other animal friends (and importantly: do they want animal friends?). All of this encourages me to be a little detective, which I love. I love sussing out what contributing factors are at play and how to best address them for each individual.
For dogs with behavior challenges, there can be some pretty clear correlations between unmet needs and those challenges. For example, a dog that is constantly digging in the cushions in the couch and starts to rip little holes in them - that is a dog who is clearly telling us they have an unmet need to dig. They are satiating that need in whatever way is available to them and so it’s our responsibility to observe that behavior and determine what else we can give them that can fulfill that unmet need and won’t wreck my couch. You might come in with something like a pile of towels on the ground and drop some treats in it and teach the dog how to dig in something else. If the dog does not want to dig in new items and keeps going back to the cushions, to me that’s information. It might suggest that it’s not just digging, but it’s digging in something that has a kind of bounce back when I push into it, something with some density to it. Then you get to go on a creative mission, maybe source some old pillows from your local thrift store or from your neighborhood free group and put them in a cardboard box and say “look you can dig right here.” You might encourage your dog by throwing a toy in there or some treats to show them they can have just as much fun in this alternative spot and you also get to keep your couch and have somewhere to sit when you want to watch TV at the end of the day.
But then there’s also less correlative things that I think are really important to keep in mind. For example, dogs that are struggling with some level of reactivity. If a person comes to me and says “my dog is great inside but as soon as we take one step out the door she refuses all food. She will spit out a cooked steak and I can’t click and treat when we see things because she’s immediately in the red zone.” I hear that a lot– that a dog can’t handle being outside. The me of 10 years ago might have said “we just need to find a distance that your dog can take food,” but now, today, I would say “What else is this dog doing? What does their day look like? What do they have the opportunities to do?” I would consider the overall stress load and start from a baseline of stable and comfortable behavior and suss out at what point they are over threshold. Sometimes we’re not looking far enough back in the picture of their day. So enrichment really encompasses all of these considerations. I might ask questions like: is the dog struggling with some kind of underlying pain that could be contributing to reactivity? Do they have other opportunities to move their body? Are they only sleeping eight hours overnight and not napping during the day so they’re a little on edge? Are behavior meds potentially necessary?
The enrichment framework really helps to encourage you to look at what all those contributing factors might be, even if they don’t seem to be correlated right away.
How does enrichment come into play with your personal dog?
Enrichment is everything with my dog, Maeby. She is what I call, for lack of a better term, a sensitive dog. I don’t want to call her an anxious or fearful dog; she exhibits behaviors associated with those categories of emotions in certain contexts, but she doesn’t go through life afraid of things. Maybe we could say she has a bit more of a “pessimistic” worldview, where when presented with something new and novel her first reaction is to be suspicious. She’s more likely to be unsure and cautious versus exploratory and confident.
Maeby has come a long way. She has some pain-related orthopedic challenges which require some physical activity restrictions and considerations. Maeby is on both pain and behavior medications and she’s currently well-managed, but when she first came home she was recovering from surgery after breaking both of her elbows in her first home. I had a 9-month-old dog who was on strict rest for six weeks and I had three cats who were very curious about what this new animal was in the house. I had to get really creative; there was a very steep learning curve on how to keep her occupied and settled. At the time I had some general knowledge of enrichment from working in shelters and from working with lots of dogs but I didn’t have a ton of experience with how to tailor those activities to a dog who was so complex, both behaviorally and medically, and what it meant to teach a dog the skills they need to engage with activities and their environment in the way I was hoping for.
Over time we’ve found a lot of things that work for us and we’ve relied really heavily on shaping Maeby’s environments and experiences as opposed to doing training and behavior modification. I’ve been very deliberate about the situations she’s in so that she doesn’t need to use behaviors that are hard for both of us. Maeby was a dog who was extremely skeptical and unlikely to interact with something like a box of paper with treats in it. I had to teach her how to do that little by little, and now she’s a dog that will sit down with an entire closed cardboard box and shred it little by little from the corner until she gets into the inner box that she then shreds. Now she has built such a strong repertoire of shredding that she shreds more than she needs to to access the thing that’s inside. Maeby will go above and beyond the necessary shredding, which tells me that this is a type of entertainment that works really well for her. On the other hand, I’ve tried pretty much every single chew available out there and when I say I’ve tried them all, please keep in mind that I worked in a pet store for many years and I am a chronic online shopper. Except for 4 specific chewing items, it’s not consistently enriching for Maeby to chew. For shredding on the other hand, there are observable outcomes that shredding is consistently enriching.
That’s the other thing about enrichment - it is descriptive not prescriptive. We cannot say “I’m giving you enrichment” because we don’t know what the outcome will be. As with the concepts of reinforcement and punishment, we don’t know if something is reinforcing or punishing until we see how behavior changes in the future. It’s the same with enrichment. We don’t know that it’s enriching until we look at the outcome. Did this activity result in the dog being more rested? Did it result in escalation or deescalation? So the fact that Maeby shreds more than she has to and then puts herself down for a nap tells me that shredding is enriching for her.
Maeby has come such a long way, and I don’t think our relationship would be as strong as it is if I didn't focus so much on those 14 categories of enrichment in the early days and how best to tailor them to our lives together.
What are some common misconceptions about enrichment?
The main one is that the ability to engage with an activity is a fixed quality in a dog. I see this all the time. Someone might say they gave their dog something and the dog didn’t know what to do with it, so they never gave it to the dog again. I would say instead, “here are all the different ways we can teach them how to engage with the item.” Just like any other behavior, we can shape it. So if we want, for example, our dog to forage in a box full of paper for small treats but they look at the box and are just like…..question mark? Instead we might just see if they can eat scattered treats on the floor first. Do they have the behavior of eating something that’s not in a bowl or at a feeding station? So I would start there by scattering some kibble on the ground. If they eat it, awesome! If they don’t, I’d point out the little kibbles to them to see if they want it. If they’re not interested in that, maybe we’d go for higher value food because we want to make sure they are motivated enough to continue trying without coercing them into eating. Once the dog is eating from the floor, maybe I’d crumple up some pieces of paper and put them around the kibbles on the floor so the paper and food become a picture that cues the eating behavior. Then I might start in a lower-sided box (like the ones that come with a case of cat food or something like that) and slowly shape that up into a bigger box and before you know it you have a dog who is plunging their head into a box to access food. If you just give up when your dog looks at the new thing and is like “I don’t know what to do with it” you’re missing out on so many opportunities for your dog to engage in behaviors that are really powerful and helpful in the long run.
Another common misconception about enrichment activities is that they have to be effortful for the dog and/or the person. I see a lot of people in my local Facebook groups say that their dog knows how to do a puzzle toy and completes it in two minutes, so they want to trade it to somebody for a new puzzle toy. But wait a second - if your dog did the puzzle toy in two minutes, what happens if you refill it a few times? There’s no reason a dog can’t do an easy activity several times in a row and have it have an enriching effect. A puzzle toy is small, but what if the puzzle toy was just bigger? What if instead of a 1x1 foot puzzle toy, you had a 1x10 foot puzzle toy? That would probably take your dog longer and they would probably get the same amount of enjoyment out of it as they would a 1x1 foot toy done ten times.
So there’s no reason you have to think of an enrichment activity as something that either takes a long time or is more difficult for your dog. For example, if I play basketball, shooting one basket and making it in the net wouldn’t be enough to fulfill my desire to play basketball. I would want to be out there for a little while shooting some hoops. If you enjoy doing a thing, you can do it for a longer period of time and still enjoy it. You don’t necessarily have to move onto something new. (Also a disclaimer that I don’t like playing basketball so maybe once would be enough for me)
What is one thing you wish everyone knew about enrichment?
I think that I wish that everyone just looked at enrichment like: opportunities are everywhere. It’s so much fun to get creative and curious. It’s not about: how can I make this harder? How can I make this more challenging? It’s about how can I make this more interesting for them? You can make even bland, everyday, banal things more interesting. Enrichment doesn’t always have to be going to a new place or buying a new thing, it could just be changing up the configuration of things that they currently have, depending on how sensitive your dog is to change. Every dog is an individual. I’m not saying to go and move all your furniture around to enrich your dog’s life, but if they have two toys they really like and one can go inside another, maybe put it inside and see what happens. You don’t have to get caught up in going for an enrichment outing, it could be as simple as going in a different direction on your walk around the block, or take a different route for new smells. There are so many ways to mix things up and keep it interesting without having to expend too much effort.
My overarching advice would be to get curious. Start by observing what your dog is doing right now. Generally speaking, how do they spend their day? Observe their behavior before, during, and after activities and take a step back. You can evaluate using those 14 categories to see where you might have a little bit more of an empty cup than others, and try to fill those.
A great way to get curious and to gather information is to just increase your dog’s opportunities for choice in as many different areas as you can. Give them opportunities to show you new things, essentially. A lot of us think we know our dogs really well, and then they surprise us when they have the opportunity. So the more we can provide those opportunities, the more we can learn about them which is always beneficial.
What is one resource that you like to share with people when it comes to their dog(s) and enrichment?
One thing that you can pay for that will give you a really great overview on enrichment and how to incorporate it in your life is PetHarmony Canine Enrichment for the Real World Book & Workbook. The workbook specifically is designed to help walk you through how to incorporate enrichment more in your life.
You can also check out Lyz Knight of Rover Rehab’s Enrichment Guide (free comprehensive ebook). This is a really wonderful, free, comprehensive enrichment guide e-book that you can download directly from her website. (**Note that DBI also interviewed Lyz a while back, you can read her interview here).
I think these are great starting points for people who are just beginning to familiarize themselves with incorporating enrichment into their dog’s routine.
What is one example of enrichment that you have seen that is unusual but effective?
I only consider this unusual because I encounter so few people who do this deliberately, but setting up a thoughtful antecedent arrangement, specifically setting up an environment with enrichment opportunities that are non contingent on the human. The dog would have free access to activities, reinforcement, whatever you want to call it, things that do not require human interaction. And then coupling that with the skills necessary to engage with those activities freely and confidently.
This really plays into the independence category of enrichment that I think a lot of dogs are lacking in more than we might think. It provides them with a ton of agency and empowers them to meet their own needs so they don’t have to pester us to do so all the time. This can really help prevent the development of what some people might call “demand behaviors,” things like scratching at things, grabbing something and running away with it to get your attention, barking. Many of these behaviors are to access some kind of reinforcer and if we can provide our dogs access to so many different reinforcers that don’t require us, they don't have to ask us to go open the cabinet and get the thing.
If we have things set up in the environment so they can make those choices without having to ask our permission, they can meet their own needs and we can get a little bit of respite. It’s important to me that my dog is able to self-entertain. I think we can do our best to cultivate independence, encourage and facilitate it.
What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part, across the board, is always seeing what I think a lot of us call “the light bulb moment,” both for dogs and for people. It’s that moment during a training session or during a consult where something just clicks and you can see that spark. You can see in someone’s eyes that they’re thinking “Oh my god, my clicker timing was amazing and my dog did the thing, oh my god!” They’re just mind blown! It’s delightful! And the dog gets it, and they do the thing a bunch of times in a row, and you have that “we did it, we got there together” moment and it’s so incredibly reinforcing to me.
What do you like least about your job?
I sometimes struggle with not always getting to see a case through the resolution or to a resolution that I feel satisfied by. I have a perfectionist streak and when you have a set number of sessions with someone and you make progress but you don’t necessarily get the long-term resolution and not a lot of follow-up, it can nag in the back of my mind for a long time: how are they doing out there in the world?
What advice would you give to someone who was interested in pursuing your career?
The biggest piece of advice is to find ways, whatever that looks like for you, to create and be in community with other like-minded professionals who you vibe with, like who you get along with and who feel good to you. This is a super isolating profession, it’s very siloed and having a support system that you can learn from and with I think is the most valuable thing. I think it’s important that this isn’t a mentor figure, there’s not a hierarchy to it, because we don’t want some underlying power dynamic coming up against your comfort level with being open. That peer-to-peer connection without a single capitalized “Knower of Things,” and a mutual understanding that everyone’s thoughts and ideas and perspectives, what they’re bringing to the table, is just as valid and worthy of respect as everybody else, is what I’m talking about.
Want to learn more about Andrea and Connect the Dogs? Check out: