In addition to physical activity and enrichment, dogs and other animals need sensory enrichment that will allow them to use taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight—often combining them into especially salient composite signals—in ways that respect their points of view and choices and enhance their emotional well-being. In Unleashing Your Dog: A Field Guide to Giving Your Canine Companion the Best Life Possible, Jessica Pierce and I focused on this topic and in her new book, Engage the Senses: Calm, Choice-Led Guide to Enriching your Dog’s World, dog expert Dale McLelland greatly expands on what we wrote and explains how to tap into your dog's sensory needs by giving them what they want by taking their point of view to enhance their emotional well-being. It's essential to understand how dogs sense their canine cosmos to become fluent in dog so you can give them what they need and the best life possible.

Here's what Dale had to say about her book, which offers a fresh, ethically informed approach to sensory enrichment that prioritizes choice, consent, agency, and emotional safety for dogs. What could be better?

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Engage the Senses?

Dale McLelland: I wrote Engage the Senses because I wanted to offer dog guardians, and anyone who works with dogs, a different way of seeing enrichment—not as adding more “activities” or training, but as creating opportunities for dogs to engage in choice-led experiences that allow them to use their extraordinary senses to gather information about their world. Dogs live through their senses, and yet many of our approaches to enrichment or training overlook that.

This book grew out of the experiences and observations of the in-person sessions I developed and ran........

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