Lazy but never boring - that's a rule!

I'm now a self confessed lazy dog trainer. I'm short on time, hate stress (as discussed yesterday), and generally have come to the conclusion that the best thing for me and my dogs is to find ways to hang out together and be happy. When we're home we don't play games. No ball chucking stuff. I've noticed how much harder work and demanding the dogs are if they have been under exercised, but not just in the physical sense, mentally. I know a lot of Slovaks are gundog trained. Seeing as I don't want to do that, I've found a happy medium of our own. What is more important is how they've been using their brain. In particular, in what mode. The picture above is a small snapshot of the large country area where I regularly walk.

By this I mean there is a difference in seeking and chasing. Especially important for a dog like Grey. I want to switch off the reactive side of him and switch on the seeking. Chasing of objects isn't really a natural state for dogs anyway and not one that I want to encourage. So no toys on walks, no thrown objects falling from the sky with all the associated injury risks. When Grey was an only dog I would hide objects for him to find. Basically, when Grey starts charging around looking for falling things whizzing through the air it's just mental and not in a good way. Not an ideal state to meet other dogs in if we bump into some on our travels.

The other aspect of my daily routine is I do one full stimulating walk rather than two or three separate trips to a more stressful environment. By stimulating I mean, thinking not just mad running. So I head out to the countryside to an environment where they are encouraged to use their noses in a good way, rather than multiple trips to a local park where they would focus on undesirable stimuli and I would have to work much harder to distract them and to avoid undesirable behaviours such as lunging, barking, pulling, chasing, possessiveness.

Here are Grey and Polka checking out hedgerows and ditches. Polka, despite her thin fur is of hardy working stock and thinks nothing of crawling through brambles. They have miles of open country to run in. And run they do. But when there is terrain to investigate like this, running is put to one side and the noses are put to use. I've found they will literally sleep the rest of the day and evening from this.