By Jo Marshall, CVT
Senior Veterinary Information Specialist

ARGH! Winter time boredom for both dogs and people has set in! Not to mention the -40 degree wind-chill temperatures that we are anticipating here in Minnesota this week resulting in school closures along with dashing any hope of outdoor activity for man or beast. So we are all cooped up, bored and irritating one another and the dog is looking for some activity. Trust me, if I don’t keep her focused on something good, it will all go down hill and she will find her own entertainment resulting in shredded papers, chewed gloves and/or skinned tennis balls!

It is hard this time of year! We are all trying to work on our latest round of New Year’s resolutions to get more active and then this happens and we cannot even get the dog out for a daily walk. Quite by accident, I came across the greatest dog and kid boredom buster ever found! I found a FREE online dog tricks class. Here is the link if you are interested in trying it out!

http://domorewithyourdog.com/pages/spark.html

So what is so fun about this? Once you get signed up, every day or every other day, a new quick training video is posted on facebook. It is a quick video, usually a couple of minutes or less and it demonstrates a very positive training technique for you to teach your dog some fun trick! This has been a hit in our house with our overactive 1 year old Vizsla and 2 teenagers that are (according to them) dying of boredom! So far this has allowed me to keep the fingers from being chewed off of the 2 new pairs of gloves that I got for Christmas and has kept everyone in the household out of my chocolate stash! Always one for prevention, I am quite sure this is preventing my kids from killing one another and the dog from eating all of my Christmas chocolate and poisoning herself while we all spend time working on these tricks with the dog. It has been turning into a lot of laughing at the silliness of the dog and each other as we accomplish these fun tricks! Go ahead – I challenge you to stomp out wintertime boredom!

Please note that we are not associated with this training group in anyway, but I just had to share this because my family is having a blast with this and we only started it 3 days ago!