Doggy Cabin Fever - These Might Help!

 Good afternoon tout le monde (everyone), 

Echo is chewing her own foot off out of boredom. The snow is fun but being inside is boring!

    If you are like me, the recent snow and ice have made getting to the dog park a little harder. Our girl Echo spent two whole days mainly inside with small walks and local dog play sessions with our neighbors. When we went to the further park for the first time yesterday, I could see several pups who also had lots of pent up energy. I know my pointer is super smart and needs a lot of exercise to keep from bouncing off of the walls and driving us crazy. So I thought I would add some things that we do for our girl in the hopes that it might help someone else. These games work well during rainy days too!

Recall hide and seek: We live in a small apartment and when working recall we came up with this fun game. It gets Echo super tired in about 20 minutes. My husband and I grab a handful of yummy snacks, I recommend anything super smelly like lamb lung or beef liver. We start by standing at opposite ends of the apartment and one of us calls Echo to them. When she comes to us we have her sit and do one or two other tricks before giving a cue like "good job" to let the other human know to initiate their recall. They call her over and while she is doing her tricks the opposite person quickly changes positions to another spot in the apartment. Then we rinse and repeat until we run out of treats or until she begins to pant from the exercise. We had to start doing this in small increments sometimes just a few feet away from each other and slowly increased the difficulty. 

Treat Sock Puzzle: I have a lot of extra long socks that I have retired for some nose work toys. The lowest difficulty was placing a few good treats at the bottom of a sock and giving it to Echo to try and get to. As she got faster and faster, I started shoving one sock with treats into another sock and then into another one. I call it sockception. This allows her to tear at the socks and have a blast without doing any real damage. And they can be restuffed again and again. 

Fetch with Tricks: I like to do this with two toys if you can get your pooch interested. Echo loves to fetch her toys inside so I will give a command and throw one toy and load up another to entice her to come back. I'll have her drop the current toy, perform a command and retrieve the next one as I pick the original up. We can play this game for a while before she gets tired so adding a lot of commands gets her brain working as well which leads to a more exhausted pup. 

Stuffed Frozen Kongs: I have a small stack of kongs and hollow bones in my freezer that I stuff with raw dog food, fresh veggies, a few treats, and a little peanut butter to cap it. These take a little prep work but I honestly love the raw food frozen disks from Mudbay that have a variety fruit, veggies, meat, and bones all together. 

Here is a chart I found on google of some good fresh and cooked foods you can give your pup!

    If I think of anymore fun games I will come back and add to this but I will go ahead and end here so that I actually post this and don't leave it in my drafts forever! I hope that you have a wonderful week and let me know if you have any dog training or grooming questions because I would love to answer them! 

Best Wishes, 

Karina & Echo