- Hi guys, it's Ken Steepe and Kayl McCann
from McCann Professional Dog Trainers.
And welcome to another episode of our dog walk
and training talk.
This is the first dog walk and training talk
we've shot this season that we've had to wear our coats.
- It's really sad.
- Yeah, we've sort of reached that point in Canadian weather
that it's a little bit cooler, so we need to wear our coats.
Today we wanna talk really quickly
about four ways that you can help your senior dog
be happy and healthy.
This back here is Slice, she's a 14-year-old Border Collie,
We're also, we're going out for a walk
with the five year old Border Collie, Slam.
But an interesting note about Slice.
When Slice was eleven years old,
she actually won the United States
dog agility association championships,
which class did she win?
- In the challenge biathlon,
so the international style classes at the 22 inch jump pipe,
which is normally one of the most competitive jump pipes
because it's made up of lots of Border Collies.
- Yeah, for sure.
So at 11 years old she was able to win that championship.
And there're a few things that we like to do
with our older dogs to make sure that they stay
both happy and healthy.
And we're gonna talk about those right now.
- One of the things that I try to make sure
that I do with her is actually look at her toenails a lot
and make sure that her toenails aren't too long.
One thing that you need to know about toenails,
for any dog, any age, but especially older dogs,
is their toenails tend to grow a little bit faster
and if you don't stay on top of them enough,
they actually can change the way
that your dog stands or walks.
If you hear those click, click, click on the floor,
if the toenails are too long, what happens
is the foot starts to actually go off like this,
rather than down, rather than using their pads,
the nails push their foot up so they actually walk
a lot on the bottom part of their foot.
And that can be really painful,
specially if your older dog has any arthritis
or anything like that.
So we try to cut her nails regularly.
She's old, she's so easy.
She gets done in five seconds.
Really, really easy, but that's an important thing
that we often do with her.
- For sure.
We've actually shot a video
about how to trim your dog's nails,
and I'll link it in a card above
so that you can check that out.
The next thing that we do is in our dogs' younger years
we typically do a lot of obedience training.
And when Slice was younger
she learned a lot of hand signals.
She learned hand signals to come, hand signals to sit,
hand signals to down, leave it, all those types of things.
And boy do I find those useful now because at 14 years old,
she can't hear me any more.
And sometimes it's really difficult to manage her around.
But, you know, she's close she kind of hear me
but if she's at distance
I have to basically rely on hand signals.
The other thing I really find works well with older dogs
is clapping your hands, especially they're at a distance.
Now, we're walking around 32 acres right now
and she's not on a leash.
We don't let her get too far,
but if she gets too far if we clap our hands that sound,
that high pitched sound or vibration that she hears
can often get her to come back to us,
and that's an easy way.
If I think she's wandering too much
of course I keep her safe by putting her on a leash.
But she likes to roam,
so sometimes you wanna try not to do that
in this environment if we can.
- For sure, and to play the appropriate color
commentator role, we've also shot a video
about how to teach your deaf dog to come when it's called.
And I'll put a card up here
and I'll also post those at the end of the video.
- The third thing that we think is really important
with having an old dog is making sure
that you keep them fit and healthy
and at an appropriate weight for that dog.
So one of the things that I think was really helpful
for Slice in competing for as long as she did
is I worked a lot on her fitness and a lot on her health.
And at that time being 11 years old,
there wasn't really anything more could train her to do,
but agility, she sort of had that down pat.
But my main focus was keeping her in shape,
making sure that she wasn't over weight,
that she was strong and that she was healthy
so that she could manage
running through obstacles and whatnot at that age.
Now, obviously, she's retired,
and I still look at her weight all the time.
I actually keep her a little heavier than normal,
just because she is old, and if she got sick
I would feel terrible if she didn't have any
weight behind her, so she's about maybe five pounds heavier
than she was at competition weight.
And she's still really happy and healthy and energetic.
And that's really important to us.
- Yeah, in a previous video, Kayl referred to herself
as a kibble counter.
So she's very careful about the amount of food
that Slice gets.
- [Kayl] Whatever it takes.
- So that she can manage that way,
that seems to have worked out really well
for all of our senior dogs.
- Yeah, for sure.
- The fourth thing that we wanna talk about
is the amount of exercise that your senior dog gets.
Now we have seven dogs that we take out for exercise
every single day.
Some of those dogs would go for a 45 minute walk with us.
Sometimes we'll do three or four laps
of whatever the area is.
Or Slice might only do one or two of those laps.
Just because, we know we wanna exercise her,
but we know that her body may not be able to handle
running around with the younger dogs
for such a long period of time.
And she may not show that she's tired right away,
like the younger dogs would.
- Yeah, she's pretty stoic, so we just use our common sense
and watch her body language and if she's still
trucking along with pretty good energy,
then we'll let her go a little longer.
And if I see that she's starting to slow down,
there's no hesitations to go and take her back
and let her have nap.
So I think it's important that when you have an older dog
that you do keep them somewhat active,
whatever is right for that dog.
Because the moment you stop doing stuff with them
and you let them become couch potatoes 24 hours a day,
that's when they get really old.
So, you wanna do a little bit with them.
Don't overdo it, that's very, very important.
You also need to know when enough is enough.
You know, dogs can't talk, we have to be able to make those
smart decisions for them.
But I believe again, one of the reasons why
she's doing as well as she is,
is we keep her moving as much as we can.
She's still able to go up the stairs at our house.
Things like that, just little bits every day I think makes
a really big difference.
- Thanks for joining us in another episode
of our dog walk and training talk.
We hope you found this helpful.
Senior dogs really are my favorite.
I mean, look at that face.
- Oh, I don't like them at all.
(laughs)
- No.
- So we hope you found this helpful.
If this is your first time with us be sure you subscribe.
I'm going to post a link
to all the videos that we talked about
in this video, on our end card.
So, from Ken Steepe and Kayl McCann,
and Slice the Border Collie, and Grand Slam,
happy training.
Bye for now.
(light happy music)