Welcome to 2013

Deb and Spirit do skijoring to stay active

For me the New Year brings such a sense of purpose.  A sense of hope and promise.  For the last few years I have dabbled with goal setting.  Last year I got a little more serious and wrote my goals down.  I am happy to report both of my primary goals where accomplished.  Maybe there is something to this goal setting stuff.  One of the biggest points when doing goal setting is to write your goals down and give them a completion date.  Make the goals easy to quantify so that you are sure when you have accomplished them.  The other big part of goal setting is to have a completely open mind, the sky is the limit and no fear of failure.

What does this have to do with dog training?  When you get a puppy everyone comes out of the gate with goals for this new puppy.  The puppy gets lots of exercise, attention and training.  Slowly real life takes over and the dog takes a back seat to other priorities.  Hopefully by this time you have achieved a relatively trained dog who is a active part of our family.  I know there are always things that you would like to improve on but overall you are pretty happy with the dog.

But what about the dog.  Yes, you provide exercise, food and toys but what about mental stimulation.  What about active interaction where you are present mentally and physically.  A dog's daily life consists of the same old same old and being told not to do something.  Even when being walked both you and the dog are off in your own worlds and not really interacting.  I am always overjoyed when someone brings an adult dog for training and they are so excited in the changes in relationship with their dogs even after a few weeks of training.

Here are some easy ideas of how to incorporate training into your everyday hectic life

1. Bathroom training - every time you go to the bathroom work on a command; sit, down, stand.  Just have a bowl of kibble in there and before you walk out call your dog over and spend 10 kibble training.
2. On your walks - take his dinner with you and practice different commands or even just his recall.
3. While waiting for the water to boil - this is 5 minutes of prime training time.  Call your dog over and do some training.

Here are some ideas of what you can train in those couple of minutes

1. Sit or down - the cue or the stay.
2. Sit pretty - great core building exercise
3. Shake a paw - each paw on a cue and both paws together, shake or wave
4. Retrieve - a small room is perfect for this.

I just had a friend lend me a great book called "10-Minute Dog Training Games" by Kyra Sundance.  I am loving it for great new ideas for training my dogs.

Go out get training and watch your dog blossom.