Last night I broke a bone in my foot and am non-weight bearing. I have a young Labrador who is already bored, so looking for things to do with him.
I live on a farm and I’m married, so DH can do some work with the dog, but what do I do when DH is at work?
Even though he’s a Lab, he doesn’t retrieve or fetch. Normally we do agility and hike the property, but that’s out, obviously. DH could hike the property when he’s here but we are in the middle of 0-sub zero temps.
Many ideas would be appreciated!
Retrieve and fetch are trainable - that could be a useful project to work on because it requires a lot of mental concentration. There are a variety of methods; some are reward based and others are not. I think both generally teach the dog to hold an object, and then pick it up, and then pick it up from a longer distance, etc.
It would start in a situation like in your house so it could be something to try in the living room. I also taught my dogs to speak, and to “whisper” so that they don’t bark loudly. That’s a fun project if they are food motivated.
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Trick train. I went through the broken foot with a high high high energy Jack Russell. I taught him to be my “service” dog. All sorts of little menial tasks and he loved it. The most useful was I attached a rope with a tug to the doorknob and taught him to pull the door shut behind me. Super useful when you’re on crutches, that’s for darn sure. He delighted in these tricks.
And yeah, fetch is a trick. Mine doesn’t “do” fetch either, until I taught him to do it on command for cheerios. He also plays catch–we literally throw the ball back and forth, again, for cheerios.
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And here, 101 things to do with a box, clicker training https://www.clickertraining.com/101-things-to-do-with-a-box
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Thanks for all the great ideas! He has a year of obedience training, plus 1 1/2 years of agility, so we’ve got a good foundation for trick training. I’m going to have DH pick up a clicker today. :yes:
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Hand signals, sit, down, roll over, right and left.
Later on add go then add a direction to go.
Once your mobile add several stays, sit stay and down stay.
My Weimaraner bird dog would go in the direction we sent him in, then turn to watch for our next command.
Cuz yelling in a field full of pheasant isn`t smart.
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I was also going to suggest trick training or scent training.
We did a scent class last summer and I still have my scent kit. Going to give it a go this afternoon. 
