Does your dog dig it?

I just came from visiting with a family whose dog decided to take a paw at landscaping design.

The dog was thrilled with the results; the owner not so much.

As I explained to them, unfortunately for us digging comes naturally to dogs. It is part of their ancient wiring that frankly as all natural behaviors, does poorly with our “requests” to stop digging and much better with management.

Most of us do not spend time with our dogs outdoors so that we are able to redirect when they get into mischief, from our perspective and engaging in natural habits from their perspective.

Teaching your dog where you want him to eliminate, areas to avoid such as flower beds and the like will go a long way before he decides what goes on in your piece of heaven.  How many of us take the time to inspect our fencing for possible sensible areas of escape, for example?

So, the expectation then is for our dog to understand exactly what he can and cannot do in the backyard.

There is also another aspect of how our dog’s brain is wired that does not help us much with this situation. Thus, we need to help our dog in order to help ourselves.

You see, dogs are not good generalizers.  Meaning that they do not understand that the rules that apply when you are present also apply when you are gone. When you are present with them in the backyard you are most likely re-directing your dog to “appropriate back yard etiquette.” If you are not, well please do not blame the dog when he begins to dig, makes holes at the fence line or chews your expensive pool furniture.

Ah!  Talking about pools.  Most dogs will NOT, I repeat, will not be able to jump out of your pool. Unless once again, you have taken the time to teach your dog how to use the steps to get out.  So please you need to treat the safety of your dog around the pool as you would with a small child.

Some of the strategies that I discussed with my clients are meant to give them some immediate relief.

First off, if your dog digs your flower beds begin with putting an actual barrier that is not offensive to you and effective in keeping your dog out.  Once that is in place, we need to find a way to satiated the dog’s instinct for digging.  So here is my solution for my client and for you.

Build your lovely dog a handsome digging area that he cannot resist.  You can go all fancy with having someone build your dog a sandbox or you can go low tech and buy a kiddy pool.  Either way, the idea is for the container to be large enough for your dog to get in.  Fill with enough sand that you can hide your dog’s daily chow (if it is dry kibble) so that he has to hunt for each morsel of food while exercising his given right of digging.  If you do not feed dry food to your dog (first off, congratulations are in order!)  you can hide tasty treats in there and even chew bones for your dog to go find.

For added benefit go outside and document your dog’s amazing capacity to find by sniffing, pawing and the like the last morsel of food. Make your own entertainment.  Do keep in mind that for this to work you must first remove the possibility of your dog digging where he began to dig- your flower beds.

Lastly, make it a habit of spending time with your dog outside so that you can teach him what is acceptable and what is not.  If you spend time playing with your dog most likely your dog will begin to associate the place where the activity takes place with you as the place where fetch takes place and have less of an inclination for mischief and decoration.

Now, if you tell me that your dog is being destructive because it spends oodles amount of time outside because you are gone all day… well then you have bigger fish to fry.  We cannot truly and fairly expect our dogs to not behave for such long periods of time without us providing acceptable outlets.