I have disabilities and chronic illnesses, and sometimes even random injuries like everyone else. I have a a chocolate Labrador retriever; he’s my buddy. But dogs are a lot of work and I needed to get help tiring him out ASAP. These are techniques I’ve learned from watching many YouTube videos, speaking with certified dog trainers, or attending obedience classes. I am not a dog trainer by any means, I just wanted to share the information I’ve learned with the disabled and chronic illness community because I know a lot of us sometimes feel guilty when we can’t take our dogs for walks.
In this video I show you 5 ways you can tire your dog out when you have issues like I do.
Below is a transcript of the video if you prefer to read it:
Hello, I’m Victoria. And today we’re going to talk about five ways to tire your dog out when you’re dealing with disability or chronic illness. Let’s get into it. I have a 19 month old chocolate Labrador retriever, and I’ve been having a little bit of difficulty over the past 19 months trying to figure out how to tire him out. But I have found several ways that I’ve been able to tire him out when I’ve been sick or dealing with chronic pain or chronic disease.
Number one, make your dog work for their food. Most of my dog’s toys are Kongs or some sort of puzzle toy that allows him to be interactive with something that will then have food fall out of it. What are puzzle toys? So puzzle toys are specially designed dog toys that you can put food in that the dog can bat around or lick at or paw at in order to get food out of them. I have a very large array of these particular type of toys because my dog absolutely loves them. I introduced them to him at a very young age at the urging of my certified dog trainer. So I have things like Kongs or the Kong extreme, actually, in this case, you can put food in it. You can cap it at the bottom. You can schmear peanut butter on the inside of it. The dog can then eat the food out of this particular toy and chew on it. My dog is a aggressive chewer, so I tend to go for the toys that are a little bit stronger.
Or you could do something like the Zogo Flex West Paw design. This is like a toppler. You can put food in there. You can plug this hole if you want, with some sort of food, like a carrot. You can put water in there. Both of these, I tend to freeze if I put food in them because my dog will take longer in order to get the food out. I also use things like the Ruffwear KnawtaRock. You pinch it open, put food in it,the dog bats it around. It is a really great toy for a dog to utilize. My tried and true is the Kong Toppler. It’s very easy, very low maintenance for me. I put his kibble in the top. Screw it on, give it to him. He tends to get at least one of these every single morning. It’s either this or the KnawtaRock.
Every evening I love these SodaPup little corns. As you can tell, my dog has absolutely chewed on it. He’s definitely a super chewer. I put peanut butter or spray cheese into the little nooks and crannies and I freeze this so that it takes him longer than half a minute to get all of the food out of it. He’ll lick it like lick it, and then he’ll start chewing on it for a little bit of time. And then he just gets kind of chill for the rest of the evening. My dog, unfortunately, does not like bones or rawhide or anything like that. I’ve never, I can’t give him bully sticks because he is allergic. But I have found that these from SodaPup, they have many different types of these types of toys. I’ll link them down below. I absolutely love them.
There’s also things like the LickiMat Wobble. As you can tell, I gave this to my dog when he was a puppy and he was just a little too aggressive with this. I actually don’t use this with him anymore because he’ll just tear this entire thing apart. But I figured I’d keep it for emergencies. But you can spread stuff on the inside, whether it be your dog’s food or a little treat or peanut butter. I tend to always freeze these because, again, if you freeze stuff, it lasts longer. Or even something like a LickiMat that you can spread food into.
I also want to point out that I have a dog that has digestive issues as well as potential allergies. So it has been difficult for me to utilize these toys. But on his specialized food, which was a kibble, it was a prescription diet formula, I would take the kibble and soak it in a ton of water until it became almost like a paste. And that’s what I would utilize to smear into toys, to to smear on, to LickiMats, that sort of stuff. when that was the only type of food that he could eat for a short period of time when he was a little puppy. You can also take that. And if your dog does well with peanut butter, you can mix the regular food with some peanut butter and schmear that you can take some canned food and and smear it as well on any of these particular type of toys. And again, freeze it because the freezing helps it to last longer.
I also want to mention some of the Nina Ottosson Outward Hound Dog Puzzles. I have a couple of those. I will give them to my dog occasionally. I can fit almost an entire cup of kibble in a lot of the Outward Hound puzzle games. My dog does okay with them. He would get too frustrated with them if I gave them to him on a very regular basis. So they’re kind of a once in a blue moon sort of thing and I’ll link everything down below in the description.
Number two, teach your dog some tricks and it can be something as basic as sit, or down, or stay, or wait until I go through the door first. Dogs very much so love that type of routine. And the more that you do it, the better your dog will get at it.
I really like Kikopup. I will put her channel down below. She is a fantastic positive reinforcement dog trainer here on YouTube. She has hundreds of videos that can show you how to do anything from heeling to really, really cool tricks that you can teach your dog.
Right now I’m working on a duck and cover type of trick with my dog. It is taking quite a bit of time because he is very excited while doing it. And if you want something more substantial, you can purchase a book like this. “Super Dog Tricks”. It has tons of different tricks and different ways to teach your dog to do them, and they all have different ratings on the particular tricks. This book was recommended to me and I would definitely recommend it for beginners as well as individuals that have done this before. I. I really like this book.
You can also do other things like work on heeling or walking on a loose leash inside your house or outside your house, maybe in your backyard if you have one. Dogs like to work most of the time. Most dogs do. I know some don’t. You kind of have to find what your dog’s thing is. I happen to have a working dog breed. I have a Labrador retriever. And so he just goes into work mode every single time that I start doing tricks with him. He absolutely loves it. But obviously, you’re going to have to find what your dog loves.
Maybe they like learning tricks like, you know, ring a bell or sit pretty or any of the other tricks that are out there. But teaching your dog tricks is really important to get your dog’s brain motivated and moving. Tiring their brain out will tire your dog out and it’s easier for me as a disabled person to tire my dog’s brain out than it is for me to tire him out physically.
Number three, make your dog smell things.
If I feel well enough to take my dog out for a small walk, I really try to make the walk about him and about enriching his life. And for me, that means to try to get him to smell as many different things as possible. If he wants to sit and smell something in the grass, as long as he’s not trying to eat it because he is still a puppy, I will sit there and let him continue to smell that thing in the grass for up to minutes. If he wants. Because the more that dogs smell, the more tired they become. Just by having your dog sniff around for like minutes, it can tire them out as much as a one mile walk. So smelling is really important.
But if you’re also like me and you have chronic illness or disability, sometimes you can’t take your dog out for a walk. It’s just not possible. It’s incredibly tiring sometimes. So there are things that you can do around your house in order to get your dog to use their nose and smell for things so that it tires them out without you having to take them outside.
One of the easiest things that you can do is in the morning, instead of dumping the dog food into the bowl for your dog to eat again in the same boring way, take that cup of food and scatter it around your living room, or your bedroom. Put it all over the place and then tell your dog to search for it. Go look for it. Go smell for it. Go eat it. Your dog may have a little bit of difficulty with this in the very beginning because he’s going to go, “what the hell are you doing? I’ve not seen this before”, but I guarantee you that most dogs who especially are food driven, will absolutely love this particular exercise.
If you want to one up it and you happen to have a backyard that you know is safe and confined, that doesn’t have any sort of pesticides or anything in it. You can take that entire cup of food and just toss it in the lawn. I’ve done that a couple of times with my puppy and he will sit out in the lawn for half an hour and eat his breakfast smelling around. So that helps to make him tired. It enriches him, but it also allows him to eat his food. So it’s kind of a win win for everybody.
You can also utilize something called a snuffle mat. Snuffle mat is a mat that has like little ties and stuff like that. It’s basically like a shag carpet that you can put food into and your dog can sniff and smell around. But if you have a smart dog like my dog, the second I put the snuffle mat on the ground and put food into it, he grabs the mat and yanks it so that all the food falls out of it. So for him, that doesn’t work so my way that I end up doing a snuffle mat is I take just an old towel and scatter his food on the inside of the towel. I roll up the towel, I tie it in a knot, and then he ends up lasting a lot longer with something like that. He’ll push the towel around, he’ll pull it out. And he absolutely loves that.
You can also teach your dog nose work. I’m actually working on this with my dog. There are tons of online classes. Fenzi Academy has a really fantastic class. I will link them down below. And there are a couple of people on YouTube that if you type in nose work or scent work for dogs, you can find some videos to start doing very basic things. Very basically, you could take, say, a giant chunk of cheese. If that’s something that your dog loves, mine does, and shove it into a sock, an old sock and then take other socks that look very similar to that sock and just toss them up into the air and then tell your dog to go find that piece of cheese. And the dog will sniff around, sniff all the different socks, and then eventually he’ll kind of start gravitating towards one sock and then you can give them the food from there or they can try to pull it out of the sock themselves.
But in the very beginning of all of this sort of stuff, you want to make it as easy as possible for your dog so that they don’t get frustrated. And so you don’t get frustrated having to now do a whole bunch of things because that’s the reason why we’re trying to do this, is to make it easier on ourselves to tire our dogs out.
Number four, make your dog run.
So I have a Labrador retriever. The retriever is a little broken in my Labrador. He’s not super interested in retrieving balls. But if you have a dog that loves to play fetch, you could play fetch inside your house. You could play fetch out in a backyard that’s enclosed. You could go to a park and put your dog on a long lead and play fetch that way. But getting them to run and be able to get out that energy is really important in order to help tire your dog.
I also love utilizing a flirt pole. Flirt pole is basically a giant cat toy for dogs. That is my dog’s most favorite. The ultimate toy for my dog is that flirt pole. He loves being able to run super fast and grasp that out of the air. It really helps to drive the prey instinct in a dog. You do have to be careful though, especially if a dog is fairly young. I got knocked over a couple of times and if you are disabled, that could be very problematic. But if you have a small dog, if you have a dog that maybe isn’t as aggressive as my little one was in terms of like wanting to grab that toy. Definitely highly recommend a flirt pole.
If your dog loves tennis balls and loves to fetch, but it’s difficult for you to sit there for a really long period of time to constantly throw the ball because of an injury, chronic disease, disability, I highly recommend getting a ball launcher. I’ll link one down below. I got a ball launcher for my dog. We tried it. We tried it. We tried it. He just doesn’t really like to fetch balls. They’re not his favorite thing. He likes more floppy toys, but the ball launcher was a fantastic ball launcher because it wouldn’t go off when the dog was standing in front of it. And there was a way that you could teach the dog to drop the ball back into the launcher so that they could learn how to do it themselves. And it also has a timer so that there’s a limit on how long they can do it because they know that some dogs absolutely love balls and will constantly fetch them as long as it’s being launched. So I think it’s a 15 minute timer. Highly, highly recommend.
I also recommend something called the Treat and Train. It is expensive. I know ball launchers are also expensive, but if you have a dog that absolutely loves targeting or to utilize targets, what you can do, and I’ve done this to feed my dog, is you can put this in the backyard. You teach them to touch this. They’ll run wherever you put it. You can even put it in your house in a different room. You can teach them how to run to this, tap it. You have to be engaged and watch, but you have a controller that you can then dispense the food into the Treat and Train. It makes a noise so that they understand. Yes, that’s the thing that you’re supposed to do. You can use this for a lot of different things. You can use this to teach the dog a down stay. You can use this to help if your dog jumps on people when they come in the house, there’s a huge booklet that comes with this, and the person that originally designed this was very well known veterinarian in behavior. She has since passed away, but her techniques are fantastic. They work really, really well for dogs. So highly recommend the Treat and Train.
You can also start teaching your dog a little bit of agility. There are agility sets that you can buy. I’ve linked one down below. I purchased this set myself and have utilized the jumps and some of the tunnels to try to get my dog to learn how to do a little bit of agility so that he’s using his mind as well as his body. And he absolutely loves it. He loves running through the tunnel, he loves jumping over things. You can also do it inside. It’s been raining a lot where I am right now. And so I’ve been finding that utilizing the jumps inside my living room has made my dog so much more tired because we really haven’t been able to go outside and do anything recently because it has been pouring rain. So that is one of the things that I am utilizing to help get some of his energy out.
Number five, if you’re having a pretty good day, take your dog out of your house, put your dog in your car, take him on the subway, go somewhere outside of your house. Get your dog in an environment that your dog isn’t in normally.
You could do something like take your dog on a sniffari. A sniffari is something that you can do with your dog in a park where you have them on a long lead, like a foot lead and you let them direct you where to go, obviously within reason. Because if they’re getting close to areas with snakes or if they’re trying to go towards another dog, that’s not going to work. But to try to get them to smell the ground and allow them to take you wherever that smell goes and let them do that for minutes, minutes, minutes, they will tire themselves out. And it’s a really good activity for you, too, because you’re not having to walk super fast. You’re kind of just meandering with them throughout a park.
You can take your dog to a dog friendly store like Lowe’s or Home Depot. You have to obviously ask, make sure that pets are allowed because these are not service animals. They are pets. But even places like Nordstrom’s, they they’ll allow you to walk your dog in and around there. Make sure your dog has good doggie manners first and just kind of take them around the store so that they can see items that are different that they haven’t really seen, maybe smell some interesting things, see some interesting people.
Dogs really like novelty. It makes them very tired because they’re in a different environment. And so they’re having to scan everything and smell everything all the time. If you want to take a walk and you normally take the same pattern of walk again and again in your neighborhood, try a different pattern, try different streets, or if you can get on a bus or get into a car and drive just a couple of blocks away from where you normally take your dog and take them on a walk there. Very short walk because this will be novel. It’ll be new smells of different dogs in the area and different animals in the area. And it’s, you know, new and dogs like new, it tends to make them very tired because they are smelling so many different new and interesting things.
You could also take your dog to a friend’s house, a friend that he hasn’t really been to too often. Let him smell around. If they have a backyard that way, you’re not really physically doing a lot of stuff, but your dog is still having fun because he’s in a new and different environment. You could meet up with another friend who has another dog friendly dog and they could have a play date, maybe a play date at the park or a play date in either one of your backyards, or if you have smaller dogs, maybe inside there’s videos online as to how to let two dogs meet if you’ve never done that before. But sometimes a doggy playdate can be really useful to tire your dog out.
If you have an outdoor mall by you that allows dogs on property, you could just simply go to that outdoor mall and sit on a bench and let your dog watch people go by. Make sure your dog’s not pulling on the leash. Tell him to sit, bring some goodies with you. For me, it would be cheese and just casually sit on the bench while your dog is watching people go by. Particularly high drive dogs like retrievers, working dogs, that sort of stuff. They do really well with this because they’re taking in so many different sights and sounds and smells and they’re trying to focus on a ton of different things. And and it’s a new environment that they haven’t been in. So it will make them tired a lot faster than potentially you taking them on a five mile walk.
Most of all, you should just take it easy on yourself. I’ve done this a lot. I’ve beat myself up for not being able to take my dog outside on a walk because I simply can’t handle the pain or I’m too fatigued to do so. And we can beat ourselves up a lot. Our dogs are beating us up. We’re doing it. So try to take it easy on yourself. Maybe implement one thing. Just try something from this video that might enrich your dog.
You’re really giving your dog the best life possible. I know that if you’re watching this video, you definitely want to give your dog the best life possible.
So I know some of the things I mentioned can be really expensive. I know Kongs can be expensive for some people or lick mats can be expensive or I mean, particularly something like the Treat and Train or a ball launcher can be very expensive. So one of the ways that you could potentially find these items with people that have maybe tried using them with their pets but they don’t really work are Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, I know that that’s in the United States. I’m not sure if they’re worldwide, but in the United States, you could ask your neighbors, hey, does anybody have any of these objects at home that their dogs aren’t using? Can I maybe try it so that maybe you could try the item before you actually buy it to see if your dog likes it?
Enriching our dogs lives with some of these activities will entertain our dogs and also make us feel more connected to them. I know that a lot of us with chronic illnesses and disabilities have pets because they enrich our lives. But I know sometimes we find it difficult to enrich theirs.
So I hope you got a little bit of ideas as to how to do that in this video. If I did not answer any of your questions, please leave a comment down below. If you like this video, you may want to watch this one. Why was I so worried about cost when I was dying? Thanks. See you next time.
Links to products talked about in the video/transcript
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I get commissions for purchases made through links in this description.)
- Kong Extreme: https://amzn.to/3xBNFIx
- Kong Topple: https://amzn.to/3IDjcQE
- Ruffwear Knawt-a-rock: https://amzn.to/3YJuada
- West Paw Toppl: https://amzn.to/3YZY78g
- SodaPup Butterfly: https://amzn.to/3lEE29d
- LickiMat: https://amzn.to/3EoFgfj
- Nina Ottosson by Outward Hound Dog Puzzles: https://amzn.to/3EmuaY9
- Snuffle Mat: https://amzn.to/418rFmb
- Squishy Face Studio Flirt Pole: https://amzn.to/3kd9P0I
- PetSafe Automatic Ball Launcher: https://amzn.to/3Emu0Ab
- PetSafe Treat & Train: https://amzn.to/3XLE4cI
- Better Sporting Dogs Deluxe Agility Equipment: https://amzn.to/3xCZvlO
- Super Dog Tricks book: https://amzn.to/3YLZ0Sa
- 30ft Waterproof Dog Leash: https://amzn.to/3KnnEEl