teagan is my smartypants dog, as you guys probably know.

and i worry that i'm not always keeping her as mentally occupied as i should be. we do obedience 3X/day, and she is just excelling (i told luc he'd better step up his game cause she's putting him to shame....heh heh heh). i try to teach her new things regularly and/or make existing commands harder.

exercise-wise, her HD and left hip bone chip to limit what we do, but she gets 5-7k of walks/day, and i take her swimming for rehab.

i play with her most of the time i'm at home and not doing something else with her or luc.

that, plus how she behaved last weekend when we went to watch geoff and sasha work - watching the FR retrieve the socks and then doing it w/no prompting herself the next day, plus her figuring out how to undo her seatbelt, really makes me worry that i'm not giving her enough problem-solving exercises. she is very smart, and will watch things, and you can see the wheels turning - she works out how to get around problems, she never accepts something as a given.

i'm planning on starting tracking w/the dogs once the snow is gone - so soon - as a novice, everything i've read suggests it would be better if i start once the dogs don't simply have to follow my footsteps through the snow.

but in the meantime - any suggestions for activities/things i can do with her that will challenge her more mentally? keeping in mind she does have physical limitations. i asked on another forum, and someone suggested teaching her to find particular toys in her box, etc, and it's also been suggested that i teach her to move her toys around from box to box, but as she can be possessive aggressive over toys, especially when given freedoms with them, i'd prefer not to do that.

thanks!

I have a good game for you and Teagen to play, but I'm not sure if you have done something like this before. When I had Cody, I took one of his favorite Cuz toys and showed it to him. He got really excited and wagged his tail alot (no jumping) and kept his focus on me. He knew I was going to tell him what to do.

I would ask him to sit and stay in a room and then put the toy in front of him ( about a few distance from him). He can't break his stay sit or stay down, but wait for my cue to tell him ok get it. When I say get it, he is able to break his sit and retrieve the toy for me. I had another Cuz toy ready. He drop the toy he had in his mouth and I picked it up. I asked him to do the stay sit or stay down then move the cruz toy a bit farther and farther until he cannot see the toy anymore.

When he can't see a toy, he knows I hide the toy in other room. He waited until I gave him my cue then he ran and searched in other room. He always find the cruz toy. I really miss doing that with him so I know that Teagen will love that game too like he did.

i think she'd really like that! hide and seek, she'd be into it. that's a good way to teach it to her too, i'd thought about it but wasn't really sure how to teach it.

i could get her to stay in the vestibule while i hide the toy. we lose 2 rooms to keeping the small animals safe while teagan is out and not crated, but if she stays in the vestibule, we'd have a fair bit of the house as a potential hiding place.