What does your dog do most of the time?

This week on Dogs of Instagram SG @dogsofinstasg, we’re having a hashtag photo activity surrounding the theme of “My favourite pastime”.

I usually like to visit all the submissions when I find the time. So I spent this morning checking them out, and also tabulating them which gives me the graphical view of what our dogs’ favourite pastimes are:

Definitely not surprising that most humans think their dog’s favourite activity is… Tada! Sleeping!

A sleeping dog

Because you know what, lying around snoozing is Donna’s favourite activity too!

Lying around snoozing without ears and lying around with ears. :P 

And lying around.

And lying around.

I bet even she thinks she is boring, once in a while. :P 

Ahhhh, boring! Let’s go bug the human. 

So I stopped to take a break and played with her a bit. And then I needed to get back to what I was doing before.

Donna is actually very independent. Once we taught her the invisible boundaries and crate-trained her, she actually preferred to sleep in her crate away from me. But you know what, I enjoy having Donna nearby, so nowadays I have taken to asking her to remain beside me on her towel.

She’s not actually sleeping here. We’re practising relax where she plasters herself on the floor and waits for her treat.

Sometimes, she has less patience and pretends to be resting her head on her legs when she really isn’t. :P

Eventually, she decides she has eaten enough and moves to lie prone on the floor instead. zzzZZZZzzzzZZZzzzz

I have been working with her on the towel consistently everyday. We are supposed to bring it to Basic Obedience Training, which begins in a couple of weeks.

She can rest for fairly reasonable periods of time (I haven’t really timed her) on it at home. But I’m already predicting that she would be too distracted to even Go to the mat when we are outside with other dogs close by. I probably should bring the towel with us on our walks to practise outside by now.  So yes, time to do that.

Matwork is great for teaching the dog to stay, settle down and be calm.

Here are some more useful links on how to choose a mat for your dog and how to start teaching it.
– How to choose a mat and start teaching matwork
– Settle and Matwork
– Five steps to teach your dog to “Go to place”

The hashtag photo activity ends on Monday. So Singapore dog IGers, there’s still time to hashtag your dog’s favourite pastime photos “#sgdogsfavpastime” on IG and stand to win a pack of Beef Lungs from Feed My Paws. Details here.