Did you know that January is Train Your Dog month? I didn't. Not until Pamela over at Something Wagging mentioned it earlier this week.
Someone also posted on Facebook the TED talk re 30 day challenges (if I were one to make New Years Resolutions, mine would be to watch more TED Talks). The concept is that 30 days is the perfect amount of time to try something new. It's the perfect amount of time to develop new habits and the short length is not so daunting as to un-motivate.
Both of these got my lil ol' brain working overtime. Hurley and I have reached a training plateau. The basics are down and while we're working on repetition, increasing duration, distance and distractions, we really haven't been working on anything new. I've also been feeling unmotivated to blog - mostly because of a lack of ideas of what to blog about. What I'm saying is that I need some fodder, folks.
So I challenge myself (and Hurley) this year to a series of 30 day challenges. Over the course of 2012, we will tackle one new command/behavior/trick every 30 days and spend the month focusing on training that one thing. Sure, we will fail sometimes. We will succeed others. But most importantly, we will try.
And here's where the fun part comes in. I haven't yet come up with the 12 things we will train so I'd love to hear about what YOU would like to see Hurley accomplish in 2012.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's post talking about what we will be working on for January's training challenge!
We taught Peter to bring in the paper. Might be a trick saved for later in 2012, but it's really nice to send the dog out for the paper on cold mornings. After all, he does have a fur coat!
ReplyDeleteI'd like to teach my dog to put his toys back in his box and to fetch a beer from the fridge. :)
ReplyDeleteI loooove trick-training. So much fun. I swear I train at least two new tricks every single week. Right now, we're working on conformation stacking. I'm doing a video tutorial that I'll post later this week. I would loooove to see Hurley stacked. :)
ReplyDeleteHmm. You could also go for carting -- seeing as that's what his heritage is kinda about, right? An awesome way to drag in those bags of food you have at your store. :)
@emily1274
ReplyDeleteJust as I was reading your comment, Suzy Greenberg came on. How I miss that girl! Hurley fun fact: he is just as obsessed with all things bread, just like dear Suzy. He hasn't discovered the joy that is bagels yet though. If he does, I'm sure nothing will ever be safe on my counters again!
"Close the door" is a fun trick to train if you don't have it yet. Very helpful when I walk in the house with an armful of groceries and can just tell Pallo to close the door, and he does.
ReplyDeleteOooo I love this idea! I've been getting revamped with trick training. I'm just easily frustrated, so it's tough for me compared to polishing their known behaviors. I do love that
ReplyDeleteParker and Skye play dead and dance- but they enjoy those ones. What does Hurley like doing already? Can you put it on command?
Thanks for all the ideas, folks! Post coming soon on Hurley's personality and likes as well as some of the ideas that are swimming in this brain o' mine.
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