- Ready, set, (exclaiming) here, here, here.
(giggling) yay!
Good boy!
Woo-hoo!
(dog barks)
- We are out for a walk today.
We have a new member with us just out for the walk,
and it's little Bruin, the Black Lab.
You can see Bruin's on a line.
We have Corey Curtis with us, who you might remember
from one of our other videos.
We did a things that new dog owners should know video,
and I'll actually post a link.
I'll put a card up on the top right hand corner for that.
But we're talking today with Corey a little bit about
some of the things that he's doing with his puppy,
some of the things that he's found helpful,
some of the things that might be, maybe
he should just eliminate from his routine,
and the idea came up or the notion Came up of dog parks.
And Corey made a great point that it's such a nice way
to burn off some of your dog's energy,
to go out and be able to let your dog burn off some steam,
and in a lot of situations, people feel like their dog
is getting socialized to other dogs.
That's not necessarily always the case, and it's something
that we talked about with Corey today, so.
Corey, let's just talk about the convenience
of a dog park for you, like, why do you feel
like you want to take Bruin to the dog park?
- Oh, definitely right now just cause we live in Oakfill,
little condo, no backyard, so a dog park's
easily convenient for us.
- Totally. - And there's
nowhere else to go.
- Absolutely, yeah I know.
And that's a pretty common thing.
People feel like their dog needs to get out
and go for a big run and sometimes
the dog park is a great place to do that.
And sometimes you need to be a little bit more aware
when you're in a location like the dog park.
Cale and I can tell you, numerous times
we've had students come in and say something like,
had my dog at the dog park and he got attacked,
and you certainly don't want your dog to be
a guinea pig for a lot of these socialization things,
getting them socialized to other dogs.
That's not the best way to do it.
- And I think it can work both ways,
there's some dogs that will go to the dog park,
and if they're already sort of maybe a softer,
more sensitive type, then it's really easy for them
to get bullied and the average person
doesn't necessarily know how to read dog body language
because it's, it sort of takes
a long time to learn something like that.
So, often there's things that are going on
between the dogs that us humans don't understand.
The dogs get it but we don't understand.
Or, the opposite can happen.
If you don't have a dog that will be overwhelmed,
maybe your dog's the bully and you don't even know.
- Yeah. - so they're portraying
some bully type behaviors, and if they're getting
naturally reinforced for that behavior
by how the other dogs react, that sometimes can
pose problems as well.
So, there's two sides of the story
that you need to be aware of when it comes to dog parks.
- Yeah, so let's talk about some things that you can do.
That you can avoid the dog park, but you can do
to tire out your puppy.
So a couple ways that you can exercise your dog
without taking them to the dog park
are things like doing retrieving.
- Yeah, retrieving is a great thing to do
because it's something that you can do
that also involves you and the dog.
Another sort of downside to doing the dog park thing is
your dog sort of goes away and they have fun
and they run, but it has nothing to do with you.
In fact, you're reinforcing them for ignoring you
because they're basically playing with the other dogs.
So retrieving is good because it tires them out
and you're doing something together.
It helps build a relationship and it's a fun thing
that you can do, even if you just do a little bit
a couple times a day, it can be good.
The hard part about doing retrieving is
you need to train your dog to retrieve first.
But, we have a video for that.
- We do in fact have a video for that,
and I'll post a link right up here somewhere,
on the other side. - Ding.
- (chuckling) yeah.
The other thing that's a lot of fun to do with your dog
and a really great way to build motivation for your recall
is a restrained recall, and we'll show you a clip of that
in just a moment, but essentially what you do is
you get a helper, or you can even do it yourself
with an extra long line, but you get your dog
really excited, really focused on a toy or some food
or something that gets them really motivated,
and then you move away from them and call them to you,
and have them chase you, and make it really fun and exciting
and if you have something like a tug toy,
when they get to you, you can tug and have lots of fun
once they arrive, and really make it all about
getting to you, and the really gratifying part being
that experience tugging with you.
- Yeah, and you don't actually have to do that one outside.
I know when Beeline was a baby puppy,
before she could really retrieve reliably
because she was so young,
Ken and I would sit at opposite ends of our hallway
with some of her breakfast or her dinner,
and we would just call her, back and forth,
up and down the hallway for, I don't know,
ten times each or something, and it was a great way
to enhance her response to name, her recall,
and then she would relax and go to her crate
and sleep after that.
It was just a fun way to do something together
and again, take the edge off a little bit.
- Another thing that people are often asking about
is socialization, and you can see that we've got
Bruin out on a long line.
This is our pack of dogs, we know
how all of them will behave and we know that
if Bruin starts to push the limit
of what's okay and not okay, that our dogs
will let him know that he's sort of overstepping his bounds.
But we would never, ever, ever try this with a dog
that we don't know, or the owner says,
oh yeah my dog's fine with other dogs
because we really can't trust it,
and it could be so damaging to your dog
if something were to go wrong.
- Yeah, so socializing, usually when people hear that word,
they automatically think that means that their dog
has to go and learn to play with other dogs,
but there's so much more to socializing a dog
that's important like taking them to different places,
exposing them to different sounds,
different sights, different things.
We live a life where our dogs,
we live in not the country but,
- Yeah, rural areas.
- Kinda the country.
So, our dogs don't really hear big trucks
and a lot of things like that.
So they're used to sort of one thing.
So what we try to do is make a special effort
to take our dogs away from here,
just to keep exposing them to new things.
Whether we take them for a walk in the city or whatever.
And not that we do this all of the time,
but just to expose them, especially while they're young,
and again, we can post a video about a little trip
we took to downtown Burlington with Beeline
a month or so ago, which was just a great experience
for her and for us too.
But yeah, so that's part of socialization,
and then, in addition to that, as Ken was saying before,
if you are gonna let them socialize with other dogs,
it's very important that A) you have an idea
that those dogs are properly vaccinated
and that your dog is going to be safe that way,
and B) that they're going to be appropriately matched
with your dog and I don't mean by breed,
I mean by their mind and their personality
and their temperament because that often will help your dog
develop great social skills and enhance them.
And I think Bruin's getting a really great
dose of that today.
Our pack is pretty even keel.
We have some dogs that are really interested
in other dogs, some dogs that could really care less.
And Bruin's already learning which dogs will be
the most playful with him,
which dogs he has to be respectful.
And it's so cool to see them sort of
communicating with each other.
And of course, we have the long line on,
so that if we need to step in and help Bruin learn something
a little bit more, then we can do that really easily
without screaming and yelling and it's just
everything is calm and really controlled.
- Mhmm.
Yeah, and a lot of fun for both Bruin and all of us.
- The dogs are getting really tired,
which is awesome for Corey and for Ken and I.
- Yeah for sure.
(chill, upbeat music)
- So in an interesting twist of fate,
we didn't come down with food poisoning
after under cooking our chicken fingers today.
- That is an interesting,
- We're lucky. - Whatever you said.
- We dodged a bullet there.
(both laugh)
I think it was a pretty good day though.
That was a lot of fun taking all the dogs out,
and then working Bruin do some restrain recalls
as well as allow Bruin to socialize a little bit
with our dogs because our dogs are so steady.
- And I'm really glad we can help Corey and Jen
with that because they seemed pretty stressed out about
having this new puppy and wanting to do all the right things
with him and wanting to go through the process
of socialization and stuff but not really knowing
exactly how to do that and maintaining a young,
crazy puppy at the same time.
So hopefully we gave them some ideas to make him
a little bit easier to deal with,
but he's such a nice little dog.
- Oh, he really is.
- Mhmm.
- Yeah, so much potential there.
- Yeah. - For sure.
- Yeah, he's great.
- And just to reiterate, the convenience
of having a dog park nearby, it's alluring,
you wanna just take your dog there
and let it run around and burn some steam off.
- I think the idea of a dog park is a pretty good one,
but for the dogs and humans relations point of view,
it's not really a good idea.
- Especially at that age.
- Yeah. - With the younger one.
- Very impressionable age. - Yeah, for sure.
He really needs to develop some reliable skills
before you give him that much freedom.
And before he gets to choose another dog over you.
- Yeah, I think that we're really lucky that we have
so many dogs because our dogs naturally sort of
understand to have good social skills and things like that
because they're used to one another.
But we're also really careful that we don't allow
our dogs to completely bond to one another before
we go through that process with one another.
Bee's almost 10 months old now and I wouldn't say,
until, maybe would you say two months ago?
- Yeah a month ago.
- Maybe, not even a month ago was she allowed to even
go for big walks around the property or
play and wrestle with the other dogs and things like that.
And that might sound really mean, but she was still
learning about how to listen to me and how to be bonded
to me and she got tons of exercise and tons of attention
when I got the dog, so much attention.
But it was just different.
It was more developing the relationship
between her and I and was less worried about
how she would get along with the other dogs.
I already knew she was a well rounded dog
and that she liked other dogs.
I could tell from her behavior.
So that just wasn't important to me.
And I'm so glad because now she will choose me
over the pack of dogs and she'll also play happily
and be a big goof ball with them too, so.
- Yeah, it's really a nice balance.
It's the right balance.
- Mhmm. - That's really
what you want from your dog.
That they're social enough with other dogs,
they understand how to interact with them,
but ultimately they're coming to you
for everything that's good, for sure.
What are you smiling at?
- I don't know, I just have, like, I have the giggles.
- Oh, you do have the giggles.
- We've tried to record this several times,
(Cale giggles)
and it always ends up with Cale bursting out laughing.
- I don't know, I think I'm tired, but for whatever reason,
every time I look at Ken I just want to laugh.
(giggling) cause he's so funny.
- Is it this?
Is it this right here?
- Cause he's so funny looking.
(giggles)
- If this is your first time with us,
make sure you hit that subscribe button.
And if this is your first time on our vlog,
make sure you check out another episode.
More than anything else, we want to make sure
that you do something awesome with your dog today.
So on that note, I'm Ken.
- I'm Cale.
- And happy training.
Bye for now.
(upbeat guitar music)