Are We Having Fun Yet?

I’ve been thinking a lot about fun lately. It has got me to thinking about how to build more of it into my daily life, the life of my family and the lives of my dogs. What is it that is fun for me? Is it fun for them?

I’ve been listening to the book, The Fun Habit by Mike Rucker lately and there is a wide range of activities that people and by extension other animals find fun. The essence of fun, as I understand it involves losing yourself in the game and finding moments of flow where thoughts of the outside world fall away and we are truly living in the moment and enjoying it.

Social media and entertainment consumption have a way of pulling us in for unspecified amounts of time and we lose ourselves there too, but Rucker argues that while in some ways these experiences trick our brains into thinking we are having fun, really, we are not. Through the clever use of the science of reinforcement, they kind of feel like fun, but they actually don’t truly deliver because the connections with others are not real and the experience doesn’t map onto our brains in ways that support us to really remember what we did, it is all just a blur. One way we can expand our fun, is to invest time reminiscing about the fun times we had. If we can’t remember what we did, it fades into the nothing. The time lost when we could have been having fun.

Fun with Social Connection

While there are lots of ways we find fun doing things alone such as walking, doing a crossword, or reading, fun with others we care about has a deep impact on our overall experience. In fact, when we have fun with others, there is a neurochemical difference. It seems our brains release oxytocin which is a feel good hormone. Additionally, there is a shared memory which creates a connection that we all crave as well as something we can remember and think about later to expand our experience of fun. For those of us with children, finding someone to have fun with can be pretty easy. For folks without children, I find dogs to be a very good substitute. In fact, I think that perhaps part of what draws us to dogs is their ability to have fun and bring us with them in their goofy moments of joy.

The Secret to Expanding Fun

When you dig into the research you uncover some surprising truths about how to extend fun that I will write about in the future, but for now I want to talk just a bit about dopamine. For a long time researchers thought that our brains get a hit of dopamine when we are doing something reinforcing such as eating or playing a game. However, now science reveals that the dopamine spike happens in two different ways. Most predictably, the spike happens BEFORE the reward, in anticipation of things to come. IF a spike happens after the reward, it only happens if the reward was better, or more than what was anticipated. There is a lot to unpack there for those of us who use positive reinforcement to train our dogs, but for this post, the critical takeaway is that building the anticipation and surprise jackpots are both fun builders for our learners.

Attaching Fun to Work

I have been writing a few blog posts about different reinforcement and how our choices around reinforcement impact the behaviour we are choosing to reinforce. I have been reading research and books about play to help me put my finger on exactly what it is that using fun infused activities such as toy play or food games gets us that simply using food alone does not seem to yield. I haven’t solidified my thinking and learning about it yet, but for now, it suffices to say that the emotions associated with the reward become linked to the environment where you are using it. If, for example, if you are using tug as a reward for agility, the feelings the dog has about tug will transfer to how they feel about agility equipment, agility behaviours, the agility field, and perhaps most critically, to you. There are ways to reproduce the fun factor with food, such as training and using a zen bowl, using a puzzle toy, tossing food to be chased and running away to collect cookies from a cookie jar, but we are lazy and don’t always use these technics to their full advantage.

Tug

I believe that most dogs are born finding the games of tug fun. In fact, I haven’t met a puppy yet that I haven’t been able to entice into a game of chase, grab bite. This is because these activities tap into their predatory sequence (more on that in another blog post). 

Somewhere along the lines, many dogs lose the “fun” in playing tug with us, and in my experience, this is simply because we don’t really know how to be good tugging partners with our dogs. We are kind of like that juvenile male dog in the dog park who barges in, not paying attention to all the subtle body language and runs full steam up to another dog’s face to say hi.

To keep tug fun for dogs, you have to pay attention to their behaviour to learn what they like and give them more of that. It could be the type of material the toy is made out of, the thickness of the bite surface, the length of the toy, the tension you are using (most dogs like constant tension), the way you are presenting the bite surface or the way you are interacting with them that is turning them off. Change things up, don’t be afraid to try something new.

Retrieve

Retrieve comes to mind as a fun game that many dogs love to play. Contrary to popular belief, most dogs don’t come with a full retrieve behaviour pre-installed from the manufacturer. Instead, they often come with part of a retrieve installed, the part that extends from that predatory sequence mentioned above, orient, chase, grab bite. The part where they eagerly bring the toy back to get it thrown again is a lot more challenging to install.

Personally, I find the work required to train a dog to return the object to me an important part of my relationship building with my dog. It strengthens our recall, prevents toy guarding and enhances our overall connection through shared activities.

Work on the Way to Fun

Sometimes the pathway to fun includes work. WHAT??? Yep, sorry to disappoint, but fun isn’t always fun. Like learning a new sport, you have to acquire the skills up to the point of some level of fluency before you can reach the feeling of “flow” that starts to feel like real fun. This is also true of tug and retrieve. Despite what you see in the movies, most dogs don’t come with these behaviours pre-installed. Luckily, expecting work helps us to stave off feelings of frustration because when things are hard, it matches our expectations.

On the way to training both of these games, there are likely to be moments that are not “fun” for me. When I throw the toy and my dog joyously runs out and grabs it and then runs around the yard for 10 minutes playing “keep away”, it is not fun (for me – though, I can find joy in watching the antics). Knowing your training plan and getting help to execute it is one way to minimize these moments of un-fun, but also shifting your mindset to progress and working through the challenges rather than focusing on the finished product can help you to re-frame your experience. For me this is kind of like putting together a puzzle, if you only found placing the last piece “fun”, you’d never get started. If you can find the placement of each piece “fun” then there is a lot of room for joy along the way.

Getting Help

Over the years I have helped many people train tug and retrieve behaviours that have opened doors for their relationship with their dogs and therefore their training for sport or for life. If you would like to train a useable tug or retrieve behaviour, check out my online course and sign-up to be notified when it is running next.

Until next time,

Love (and have fun) with That Dog.

Heather