Introducing your puppy to water… the right way!

Who else is excited for the summer weather?!

Here in New Brunswick we are currently experiencing a heatwave! This brings lots of questions on how exactly to keep your pup cool during the summer months. There are tons of ways to keep your pup cool, but there’s no doubt about it that swimming in the water is the best way to quickly cool your dog down and keep them cool. So let’s get started!

Things you’ll need!

  • High value treats
  • Water toys
  • Small plastic pool
  • Water (duh!)
Petunia at 9 weeks, playing with her favourite water toy!

Some dogs are naturally more drawn to the water, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t teach your pup to love the water. I’m not claiming that this will work for every single dog, but in the majority of cases you’ll have a water loving dog in no time with a little patience and training.

Start by determining whether your dog is motivated more by food or toys, and use whichever your puppy prefers. It’s best for this to use both treats and toys eventually but start with your dogs favourite.

Treat method

If your puppy really loves food, kibble may be just fine, but we choose to get the good stuff out when teaching new things! Some favourites in our household are dehydrated liver, chopped hot dogs, cubed cheese, but whatever your dog likes will work!

Start by just walking your puppy around the pool to see their reaction, don’t put any pressure on them and whatever you do, don’t force them into the pool. Forcing them in, too quickly will often have the opposite effect and you’ll end up with a puppy that is scared of the water.

This will go one of two ways, either your puppy will go right in the pool, or they’ll go around it. If they go right in, perfect, you have a confident puppy, reward them heavily with treats and tell them how amazing they are, and repeat! Most puppies will go around the pool though, and that’s fine too.

If you have the second kind of puppy, start by taking a treat and luring them into the pool. It may take a few tries but if you reward them for the littlest try, they’ll catch on quickly. Some puppies will do much better if you walk right in with them, and some don’t need it. Some puppies need to be rewarded for going near the pool and never stepping foot inside (yet!), and some can be rewarded for putting one paw in, and some will jump right in after the treat. Move through the steps as slowly as you need to for your puppy, but once your puppy is confidently going in the water for a treat or when you point (I use the command “go in the water”) then you can move on to the next steps! Hopefully your puppy will also start going into the pool for fun to cool down without being asked!

Toy method

First grab your puppy’s favourite water toy and get them all excited playing with it away from the pool. Once they are really into it, bring them near the water and see what they do if you throw it in the water.

Note: Your dog should already be toy motivated and know how to fetch and tug, etc.

If they go fetch it out of the pool, throw them a party and play with their toy away from the pool again. Repeat a bunch of times and eventually they should love fetching it out of the water and it will definitly cool them down and tire them out. If they really don’t want to go in, i’ve had good sucess with tying the toy to their flirt pole and getting them to chase it into the pool.

To increase difficulty you can then move onto toys they don’t love quite as much, get them to “leave it” for a minute before fetching or move into larger bodies of water such as the beach or river.

Working with toys they don’t love as much is a great way to practice building their toy drive. You’ll have to get very active and excited until they get excited about the toy too. Basically don’t give up until they start playing with the new toy, just like their favourite. This is also a great activity to do with all toys, not just their water toys! Switch out their toys often to keep it interesting.

Getting them to “leave it” requires them to know what “leave it” means. So if they don’t know yet, go back and teach them before doing this step. Even if they know leave it well, you’ll want a leash for this part. Put a leash on your puppy, then say “leave it” and throw the toy into the pool. If they go to get it, pop the leash lightly and say”no”, keeping in mind that you don’t want to discourage them. Once they leave it and look at you, say “okay” and release the puppy. Holding them back like this will make them NEED to get the toy even more, which will build confidence, drive and enthusiasm in the water.

To start at the beach or river you’ll have to check out our next post!

Happy swimming! Comment and let us know how your puppy does, we are happy to answer any questions you may have!

Petunia’s 1st Birthday Party!

To say our dogs are spoiled would be an understatement, we really go all out for Birthdays especially! Normally we will bring the Birthday dog to the pet store to pick out some goodies, make a cake, and invite some of their friends over to share the cake and play. Due to social distancing our plans had to change a bit for Petunia’s 1st Birthday. Although Petunia missed her friends, she had a wonderful weekend!

In our families we tend to celebrate Birthday’s for a full week, so it’s really no different for our furry babies! Petunia’s Birthday weekend started with a snowy hike, we joke that Petunia ordered the snow because it’s her absolute favourite, she was thrilled! She has always been an “arctic creature” as we call her, she loves to run, roll, catch snowballs and burrow in the snow, it’s adorable! She was so happy to start her weekend off with snow. After that we picked up her cake and gift that Luv paws put together for her.

Sunday we had an Easter egg hunt, then had cake for Petunia and all her siblings! They all loved the cake! Having 7 dogs we have a fair amount of Birthday parties and other holidays, so our dogs know very well what “cake time” means and they go WILD! Petunia then played a game of Frisbee with her new extreme flyer from the Kong Company. This Frisbee has held up to her tugging very well, even if it only has been 1 day.

This morning was her official Birthday, she started off the morning with a filled Kong (we’ll be posting our favourite recipe soon, so keep your eyes open!) , breakfast including leftover cake, and a game of Frisbee! Next we went for a walk on our favourite trail; Nothing better than an off leash romp. Then we bought some timbits and a plain doughnut for the Birthday girl. She practiced her “hold it” with the doughnut and the timbit box, she did very well! You’d never know it was her first time holding a doughnut and she is food obsessed. There will be a blog post about teaching a good “hold it” soon!

We finished the evening off with supper, more leftover cake and finally she passed out for the night.

Enjoy the video!

Easter Egg Hunt

Dogs love to be included in everything right? Our dogs like to take part in the festivities of every holiday! We bake them cookies and cakes, we dress them up in cute decorations, so for Easter we thought we’d do an Easter egg hunt. We have access to woods on our property so it made sense for us to hide the eggs in there, but it can also be done in the yard or even inside.

We bought some plastic eggs and filled them with our dog’s favourite treats including quail eggs. Then we hid some around the woods (since it was their first time we hid them easily) and let them sniff to find them one at a time. This is a great and enriching way to add some simple scent work to your schedule since they have to sniff out the treats, as well as tire your dog out mentally.

Some of our dogs caught on more quickly than others and some needed help, but everyone had a blast! This will be a new tradition for sure.

This was our first time trying the Easter egg hunt, we enjoyed it so much that we intend to hide more things around the woods for them to find, and try some scent work classes or seminars in the future! We love finding new ways to tire our dogs out mentally; canine enrichment is one of our favourite topics, so keep your eyes open for more ideas soon.

Enjoy the video!

Welcome to our blog!

Are you obsessed with dogs? Are you always wanting to learn new things about dogs? Does reading and seeing cute pictures and videos of dogs make you smile? If you answered yes to any of these questions then this is definitely the blog for you!

Throughout this blog we will be talking about all things dog related, including recipes. We will be sharing all our best recipes including dog cakes, cookies, pies, frozen treats, kong recipes and our favourite supplements to feed and what they’re good for. These recipes are tested on all of our dogs (but everyone knows they aren’t picky haha) as well as other pickier dogs. These recipes will be picky dog approved!

Our next category is going to talk about all of our favourite products. We will share all our favourite treats, food, toys, beds, collars, leashes and bandanas! All of our dogs have different favourites, and with our wide variety of dogs in our pack, I’m sure we have one that relates to your pup!

We will also be talking a lot about training, as it’s a huge part of our lives and our dogs lives. Our youngest pups typically have 2 formal training sessions daily, but their whole lives are revolved around training. Off leash hikes are a great source of enrichment and exercise but also a wonderful time to practice “leave it” “come” “stay with me” “fetch” and many more commands! Our older dogs don’t get as many formal training sessions as they aren’t involved in dog sports and they know all the basics. Some of our dogs don’t know many tricks, so we will probably use them to explain how to teach different tricks from the start! We are not trainers, we are just two people who have tons of experience training different dogs and want to share our journey with whoever wants to read about it.

Another category will be entirely about canine enrichment. A tired dog is a happy dog right? Who hasn’t heard that saying before? Most people think of a tired dog as a dog that’s just run a marathon, but what many people don’t understand is that a truly tired dog has to be mentally tired as well as physically tired. Training is one good way to achieve a mentally tired dog, but in this category we will talk about different puzzle games that you can put together for your dog easily, and anything that is considered mentally enriching for the dog! We will also talk about the best mentally stimulating products that are out there!

There will also be a section on dog grooming. We are both dog groomers and will be sharing different tips for nail trimming, properly brushing, bathing and sharing our experiences with grooming in general. We will also help show you how to deal with dogs that may not love grooming, or dogs that have some fear of grooming. During these hard times with COVID-19 many dogs will not be able to get to their regular groomers, so this section will likely help you keep your dogs in better condition until you can get to a groomer again!

Our final category is probably going to be the one we use the most, this section will be all about our fun adventures with our dogs. Having fun with our dog is the most important thing in the world to us. We are excited to share our gorgeous pack with you, and all our fun adventures! We’d love if you would follow along! Follow us on Instagram to see when new blog posts are up, itsallaboutthebarks.