2. Food: The Working Dog and the Invention of Enrichment

“The Dog Whisperer,” Cesar Millan’s enormously popular TV show, which ran on National Geographic from 2004 until 2012, popularized the idea that all dogs, not just working breeds or those that actually assist in police, military, or medical jobs, want first and foremost to work for the rewards of food and human affection. Today the idea that all dogs naturally want to work is a commonplace. Banking on it, much of the advertising around pet products has come to rely on one of two fantasies: that of a golden age before domestication, when wolves roamed the earth and howled, far off in the distance, or that of a golden age of domestication, when early dogs and early humans lived side-by-side in harmony, hunting and eating together. This romantic imagery seems to have the strongest hold on dog food and feeding practices.

The basic tenet of the new lifestyle called work-to-eat is that placing a full food bowl at the dog’s feet twice a day wastes an excellent opportunity to make the dog work for its meal, as all dogs originally had to do when they hunted alongside humans. Accordingly, the increasingly popular lifestyle calls for a new generation of interactive dog feeders. Encouraging owners to “banish the bowl,” feeders like the Kong Wobbler release dog food over time, often requiring problem solving. This claims to improve dogs’ lives in several areas: it slows down a dog that eats too fast and, more generally, it tires out the dog. There are recipes online for what to fill your Kong with, and many recommend freezing the filled Kong before giving it, so as to make the food even more difficult to obtain.

Proponents of work-to-eat claim that dogs who do not have to work for food are bored and potentially destructive. One website even compares domesticated dogs—in contrast to wild dogs and wolves—to workers who have retired too early, who have higher mortality rates and waste away in nursing homes.1 Descriptions of feeders focus on how the dog will be challenged and stimulated, both mentally and physically, by the awkwardly shaped, mysterious plastic or rubber thing from which it must extract its meal, and occasionally describe the dog as “earning” its dinner.

Like many other new dog toys on the market, which have stopped resembling children’s toys and cuddly stuffed animals, interactive feeders have distinctly minimalistic/futuristic design and are clearly meant to appeal to owner aesthetics. Their sleek, neutral looks fit well with not only the actual look of “the contemporary home,” but also with how owners imagine an optimized life—for dogs as well as humans.

But the challenges that the work-to-eat lifestyle makes available to today’s pet dogs have little in common with the meaningful work that created the idea of the dog as a worker in the first place.

Dogs were indeed fellow workers—who might have been said to “earn” something—but only because they had real jobs, tasks that accomplished much more than just exercising their minds and muscles in order to get tired. These tasks were the key to dogs becoming our essential companions over millennia. The dramatic differences among dog breeds that exist today resulted directly from human communities needing different things from the dogs who lived alongside them in particular regions, climates, and economic conditions. The specific jobs of dogs, like sled pulling, livestock herding, and hunting, were essential to community infrastructure. In warring cultures, dogs were used in fighting. To this day, dogs are irreplaceable experts when it comes to search and rescue, since no technology that can compete with a dog’s sense of smell. The same goes for a service dog’s ability to detect when someone is about to have a seizure, when their blood sugar is dangerously high, and in their ability to detect cancer—and now even Covid—by smell.

The commodification of dogs in the practice of breeding and its place in the history of agribusiness is hardly innocent, as Haraway has deftly pointed out.2 But its history shows, at the very least, that it was the particular jobs—and not just the act of “keeping busy” itself—that mattered. This includes the invisible labor of females doing the reproductive work, in communities where prized puppies were traded for goods.

The work-to-eat concept has little connection with the real history of the working dog, or the dog as worker, who had a specific, important job to do and so was an essential part of the functioning of the community. Instead, today’s pet owners are encouraged to offer their dogs maximum challenge and stimulation for its own sake, as if they were helping their dog become the best dog it could be. A tired dog, we are constantly told, is a good dog.

What is at stake in this idea—sometimes also called “enrichment”—and whom does it benefit?

The term enrichment was originally applied to wild animals in captivity. Zoos and aquaria have environmental/behavioral enrichment programs that purport to increase the quality of life for their captive animals, providing species-specific stimuli to increase optimal psychological wellbeing. The goal is to counteract stereotypy, or phenotypic behaviors that are repetitive and maladaptive, serving no apparent goal. The classic zoo examples are caged animals pacing or swimming in circles, elephants swinging their trunks, and bar biting and excessive licking. Many of these cause harm to the animal.

In more domesticated contexts, examples of stereotypy include overgrooming in cats, dogs chasing their tails, and even hand flapping in humans. One of the animals most prone to stereotypies is the horse, with repetitive stall walking, weaving, crib biting, and wind sucking. These behaviors were once called abnormal because they are maladaptive. Today, however, they are taken to indicate abnormality not in the animal but in its environment. Enrichment was born within a specific framework—the need to provide psychologically damaged or otherwise stressed captive animals with mental stimulation. In other words, it is itself a symptom.

Animals with stereotypies have been shown to respond well to positive reinforcement training (PRT), where they are rewarded (usually with food) for doing certain tasks. For this reason, positive reinforcement and enrichment are categories that have grown together in the popular imagination. Enrichment toys are a key part of the general shift to positive reinforcement training in dog-owner culture. These are things that were once called toys but are now packaged as puzzles, problems to solve, or just mental “work,” like sniff work. Tugging is also a popular reward for dogs that like to tug but are not sufficiently “food motivated.”

Once more, however, this work has little to do with the jobs that working dogs once had. Enrichment in the form of “work” seems like nothing more than keeping your dog busy, a classic example of alienated labor, effort completely devoid of all of those powerful affective signs that social animals need to feel connected and important, signs that one’s work actually matters to the successful functioning of a community or even the smallest social unit.

As devastating as alienated labor is for the human psyche, we should expect it to be even more damaging to dogs, who are social animals in much more literal ways than humans. “Social animal” doesn’t just mean enjoying the company of others: it means constant cooperation for the sake of survival. One of the big lessons of positive reinforcement training is that food isn’t the only motivator in training. Many dogs are actually more motivated by their beloved toy, or a game of tug, or even just praise and physical affection—whatever reinforces the relationship with their handler. The work isn’t necessarily about food at all, except in the much deeper and more abstract sense that the dog seeks a closer and more functional relationship with its human. What this means is that the dog’s willingness to work is product of interaction with humans, and not simply an extension of their ancestral wolves’ natural hunting instincts. A dog undergoing PRT isn’t hunting for the treat it receives as a training reward. It’s solidifying its relationship with the social unit that will eventually go hunt and eat large prey together, protect territory and young, and work together to ensure thriving.

Neither is the dog earning its food. A dog doesn’t earn food by eating it from a Kong any more than a human earns food by working out at the gym or wearing a FitBit. As with other lifestyles evoking a happier, healthier, more natural past, like the paleo diet, barefoot running, or earthing3 work-to-eat relies on broad, often superficial claims about animal instincts and reductive versions of the complicated histories of land, animals, and humans.

Although we imagine dogs as fundamentally food motivated, much more driven by appetite than humans, the concept behind this lifestyle is grounded at least as much in the history of human work culture as by what we know about canine nature. The phrase “work to eat” has no original connection to dogs. It first appears in the New Testament, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, where the aphorism “he who does not work, neither shall he eat” is at the heart of a moral condemnation of idleness, long considered a sin. Attributed to Paul the Apostle, the aphorism was cited in speeches by John Smith to the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in the 1600s, and then by Lenin during the Russian Revolution in the early 1900s, and eventually the Soviet constitution of 1936.4

This ancient ethic is receiving a new lease on life today, with the shift from humans to dogs but also, and perhaps most importantly, with its emphasis on gear. The work-to-eat lifestyle is more reminiscent of a Silicon Valley startup buying standing desks or balance-ball chairs for its employees in order to enhance productivity. I have to work to be able to afford the latest gear to then be more productive at work.

The success of Kongs and other such feeders is due in part to the fact that they deliver on their promise of tiring your dog. They are especially useful for dogs that eat their food too quickly or dogs that are highly aroused or anxious—states that are often associated with and present in dogs that have been through scarcity in some form, whether it was being weaned too early or abandoned, or actually hungry, or simply in the presence of resource guarding or reactive dogs in the shelter. When reduced to their most basic concept, interactive feeders are actually quite brilliant tools. Solving a puzzle not only tires out your dog but actually slows down their mind, a key component to counteracting anxiety or hyperactivity, functioning in a similar way to a walk. As one small part of a complex program to build a dog’s confidence and mental balance, they are quite useful.

But context is everything. It is by no means obvious that, by itself, pulling kibble out of a puzzle feeder makes for a better, happier, richer dog life—unless we accept that today’s “innovative” technologies and gear designs harness and cultivate strengths and talents that would otherwise remain forever hidden, like the perfect posture that improved office ergonomics promises to deliver. We would then have to further accept that the best world is one in which those hidden talents are put to use improving productivity. The goal in such a world is no longer just work but the optimizing of work and of life itself. And the sin in question is no longer sloth but allowing abilities to remain dormant when there are technologies available that would effectively put them “to work.”

This distinctly advanced-capitalist way of thinking about work—in which everything is in its service—leads to exhaustion. And indeed, from far enough away, work-to-eat appears as a study in ongoing, mutual exhaustion between dogs and humans. The most positive user reviews of interactive feeders mention that the dogs are exhausted after using the product, an unquestioned positive in a world of dog ownership where humans are short on time and energy to devote to their dogs because of—you guessed it!—work. There are many other things that humans can do to use innovative feeding techniques in their training, like banishing feeding times altogether and reinforcing (by feeding by hand) only those behaviors one wants to see, like calm states, sitting, lying down, and during structured walks. Or keeping to feeding times but only hand feeding. But both of these require time and attention that working humans rarely have to devote to their dogs.

The Kong has simply replaced the bowl as that which we put in front of our dogs, hoping it will keep them busy. Feeding dogs from bowls has come under attack only recently, in the context of the other pressures of modern life in which dog owners must constantly look for new ways to tire out their dogs, for whom they never have quite enough time. Just because dogs are domestic animals doesn’t mean they’re not also in captivity. But just because dogs are “ours” doesn’t mean that we’re not also in captivity. And as the nonhuman animal closest to humans, dogs suffer alongside humans, their bodies and lives shaped thoroughly by the very same material and ideological conditions.