How to Work It Out When Your Dog Has to Rest

When you get your dog after the surgery, you may say to yourself that resting for your dog means resting for you too. You won’t run with your dog nor take long walks and so on. But in the end, this recovery may be much more demanding than the ordinary care.

Keep the active dog at rest may not be easy. And the dog which is used to activities all day will get bored, it can be repugnant and tiresome, it can start to destroy things and so on. What to do and not to get yourself or the dog mad?

When you cannot keep its body occupied, keep its head occupied. Get or make brain-teasers which will entertain the dog. You can also buy other interactive toys. But when choosing the right one for your dog, think about its condition and health issue. More information in my article dog brain-teasers.

The dog will certainly be certainly happy with nosework games. I wrote about this in  Nosework – Sport for All the Sniffers. At home, you can start with the dog guessing in which of your hands a treat is, he can try to find it covered under small cups or you simply hide some treats in the room.

The time when your dog has to rest may be a perfect opportunity to improve handling commands and learn new tricks. You can train and improve handling basic commands as come, sit, lie down, shake, take, drop, stay and so on or learn various new tricks (a few tips can be found here: Three Tips for Unusal Commands That Will Entertain Your Dog and Help You). And again, you have to take your dog’s health condition into account and do not let him to get too active.

Because the dog cannot spend much time outside, let him at least look outside the window or, if possible, sit down on a bench in a park with him.

Have you already survived some time when your dog had to rest? Were you successful at keeping him busy?