Lake House Series Video 2: On Getting Your Dog Used To New Neighbors and Surroundings

Lake House Series Video 2

… And this is why I took Ray to agility last night. As you can see, she’s got a lot of energy to burn and this isn’t the best place for it. It’s not safe for her to be running on these wood floors, for one thing, and it’s just too constrained in the house to have her do this. Now, we have a fenced in yard, so she can go out there, but, still, she’s not gonna want to be alone out there running around and getting enough energy burned off.

Hi, I’m Dr. Carolyn Lincoln with Play to Behave and you can find out more about me at playtobehave.com. If you watched the first video in this series, you probably noticed that Ray was off leash, and I wouldn’t recommend that to just anybody because you want to make sure that your dog is going to come when called and that you’re in a safe area. Now, at home I have a fenced in yard which makes it a lot easier. As you can see, that’s where she needed to be last night, but it’s so muddy outside that I didn’t want to let her out. Plus, I planned to take her to agility. My class was cancelled, but here’s a big benefit, and this is what I wanted to share with you.

If you take your dog to a class like agility. Or, there are many others, you could do search-and-rescue, you could do tracking, rally, obedience, etc. Sometimes you can have access to that facility for a rental fee, which is the case for me. So, for $20 I could take her there for an hour. She got to run around, play a little frisbee, practice some agility, and we used both mental and physical energy. That’s really awesome. She wasn’t dirty when we left!

Today, I’m out at the lake house again, but it’s pouring rain. I didn’t bring the dogs because I’m having some deliveries made and somebody is cleaning. And, of course, those are times when you don’t always want your dogs around, and I didn’t want to just leave them in a crate. So, they’re at home.

I was also going to scope out an area right near me that has a trail that has water, basically, on three sides. So, I feel safe on it. It’s not used very much. That’s another place that you can work on having your dog off leash. Again, you want to be careful, make sure they’re going to come when they’re called. You want to pick a safe area. Try to go during the middle of the day when there’s not a lot of people, not a lot of animals, and at dusk and dawn you’re going to see more deer and bunnies and things like that that your dog might chase. That’s another good reason to go during the middle of the day.

I like to pick places where there’s cliffs on three sides, or water, you know, different natural barriers. That way my dog isn’t going to leave me, but is also very far away from a road.

Now, once Ray gets older, like Pepper, then I can trust her to stay with me. Pepper is another story because I can’t take her off leash that easily anymore because she can’t hear. She’s going to be 14, oh my gosh, I can’t believe she’s going to be that old. But she’ll be 14 in just over two weeks. Her hearing has really gone. So, if I scream, she’ll come, but then people probably think that I don’t have control over my dog. And she can’t always hear me, like if we’re by the water and the waves are loud, then she can’t hear me.

Think about those things when you’re taking your dog somewhere off leash and you can work on recall as well as getting all of this energy–crazy energy that they have–out. Anyways, I had a lot of fun with Ray last night, and just wanted to share that with you. I’ll see you soon!

What do you want, Ray? A toy? Wanna go do agility? Wanna go jump, and tunnel, and climb?

Again, this is Dr. Carolyn Lincoln with Play to Behave and you can find out more about me at playtobehave.com. I’ll keep chronicling what is going on to get my dogs moved to a new place.