Keeping Dogs Entertained with a Clam Shell

Giving your dog a “Job to do” can make all the difference to the amount of destruction that happens at home while you’re not there. Many dogs love to take a nap or dig for treasure in a sandy patch of the garden. Why not create that place for this to happen, rather than leaving it up to them to choose your favourite patch of lawn?

Here are our tips to teach your dog to use their special place for digging and napping:

• Plastic clam shells are the ideal container to create your dog’s own play area. They’re cheap to purchase, easy to move around and low enough to the ground for most dogs to climb into.
• It’s best to purchase bagged Play Sand to fill your shell as it stays clean and since it isn’t ‘dirt’ there’s not the bacteria which creates smells.
• Play Sand is also super fine which means it dries out fast if it gets wet from rain or sprinklers and it doesn’t attach greatly to toys or treats when being used as a digging pit.
• When teaching your dog that this is ‘their spot’, you need to bury a couple of treats and toys in there then take your dog to the digging pit and get excited about showing them to look for ‘treasures’.
• Burying 2 or 3 ‘treasures’ acts as a ‘lure’ to encourage your dog back to keep ‘finding new things’.
• To get you started, try chopping up some pig’s ears into smaller portions with secateurs or bury strips of duck jerky along with 1 or 2 cheap toys each day.
• It’s best to cycle the toys so there are new treasures to find each day to keep things interesting.
• Remind your dog each morning of the job they have at hand for that day. Take them to their special treat and toy loaded clam shell every day before you leave. They will quickly learn to go look there when you leave and every day, you will find they will have eaten their edibles and played with their toys and hopefully…. You’ll have no holes or upended pot plants! Yay.