Woods in the city?

As you can see below, Bésoleil and Tina LOVE to go for walks! 

 

 

Something we knew about Tina - she's noise sensitive.  Loud noises are scary for her and these include: lawn mowers, loud trucks, buses, garbage trucks, etc.  When she hears these noises she will tuck her tail and want to "get away" from the noise. Tina is definitely a flight vs fight dog. She has no interest in getting into with anyone or anything - she just wants to have control of her environment to get away from the noise that is causing stress for her. 

 

Now we live in Seattle and in a pretty noise active neighborhood.  So, I have a couple ways of  helping Tina work on her noise worry while keeping her from being completely stressed out or what is often called "going over threshold".  This is a great LINK talking about thresholds

 

The main goal is to find quieter areas and streets then, watch how Tina does with the noise.  If she stays under threshold then repeat those walks over and over.  On those walks there will no doubt be some noise but, it won't be an overload of noise.  By repeating the walk she gets use to the predictability of the walk (which lowers her stress) so that if a scary noise occurs she can recover quickly.  And AFTER each scary noise occurs she gets an awesome treat! 

 

When D'light first came to us we couldn't make it down a few blocks without him going over threshold so, progress does happen - D'light is living proof of that.  Sweet D'light now loves walking anywhere. Like everything it just takes, time, patience and paying attention to what the dog is telling you.  The dog is often telling us a ton, it's just us not paying attention!

 

While we live in city, we actually have a 17 acres wooded park within an 1/8th of a mile our house! It's called Frink Park and it lots of woods and winds down to Lake Washington.  So, off we went on a woods walk!  While the pictures and video are dark, this was a daylight walk.

 

Down the trail we go!

The dogs did great and everyone enjoyed the noises in the woods and all the different ground textures and smells.

 

 

We went down to the stream - I was curious to see how both Bésoleil and Tina would react to the stream and walking over the wood bridge.  As you will see they did better than I did and I forget how slipper wet wood can be. Lucky for me I didn't fall and since I don't know how to edit video you get to see and hear the slip.

 

Bésoleil hears a bird and she'd like to go flush it out

Tina checking out the stream

Dlight says "SQUIRREL!!" and he's ready to get it!

Back up the hill we go.  I love this part of the trail because about 20ft away there's a pretty busy road. So the dogs hear all kinds of noises and as you can see Tina was a rock star!  Be prepared for more walking in the woods adventures.

 

I recently read a blog post and I thought it was super!  So, I thought, might as well tag it here since my dogs would all agree that Your dog needs a walk!