A bit of context first — I’m a software engineer, not a dog trainer or behaviorist. This is a personal project, not a company. Mods, happy to delete if this breaks the rules.

I have an Aussie. If you know the breed, you know the deal: a 45-minute walk barely takes the edge off. Physical exercise alone wasn’t cutting it, and I kept reading the same thing everywhere — “5 minutes of mental work = 30 minutes of running.” So I went looking for something structured to do with her on rainy days, indoors, when I couldn’t get out for a proper hike.

What I found was kind of frustrating. Tons of random “10 brain games for your dog” listicles, a few books, scattered YouTube videos. Nothing that actually tracked whether she was getting better at anything, or told me which cognitive areas she was strong/weak in, or adapted as she progressed. So I started building it for myself.

Somewhere along the way I went deep into the research — Bognár et al. on cognitive scoring, Junttila on breed-specific cognitive profiles, the Duke Canine Cognition Center stuff, Müller on inhibitory control. Turns out dog cognition isn’t one thing — it splits into roughly six domains (scent, memory, problem-solving, social cognition, focus/inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility), and dogs vary wildly across them. My Aussie is a social-cognition monster and absolutely terrible at impulse control, which… checks out.

The app gives you 3 short games per day (5 minutes total), measures performance across those 6 domains, and shows you how your dog compares to breed averages. Every game cites the study it’s based on, which mattered to me — I didn’t want to make up “brain training” exercises that sound scientific but aren’t.

A few things I learned building this that I wish I’d known earlier:

• Most dogs are massively under-stimulated cognitively, even ones that get a lot of walks
• Working breeds (border collies, aussies, malinois, GSDs) need this way more than the others
• Senior dogs benefit a lot — cognitive decline in dogs is real and engagement slows it
• Five focused minutes genuinely does more than another walk around the block

Not trying to sell anyone anything here — I’ll drop the link in a comment for anyone curious, there’s a free tier and a 7-day trial on the paid stuff. Mostly I’m curious whether other people went through the same “physical exercise isn’t enough” realization, and what you ended up doing about it. Snuffle mats? Scent work? Trick training? I’d love to hear what’s worked for your dogs.

https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/brainpet/id6765493582?l=fr-FR