Reply To: Dog sport/Activity suggestions

[jesse mcclure]

Hunting itself is not one of the recommended activities. It could have been – it was in our initial pool of items, but perhaps it is because there are so many component behaviors in being a good gun dog that the personality surveys didn’t align well with being an effective gun dog. In otherwords, there may be a wide range of dog “personalities” that can make great gun dogs. While I’m not a hunter myself, this would make sense to me: does your hunting dog need to track, or to retrieve, or to point, or all of the above? Each of these components are in the activity list.

Or it could just as well be that there is a behavioral dimension relating to being motivated for the actual hunt (retrieving a real duck) but having less interest in the dog-sport components of hunting. But this behavioral trait may not have been captured by the personality portion of our questionairres so we didn’t find good correlations on which to recommend hunting itself for a given dog.

Also, when you look at the activity recommendation page, every activity is listed for every dog regardless of their survey responses. This is because we generally want to encourage people to be active with their dogs. *All* of the activites are good/healthy for dogs in general and if we can introduce people to dog activities they’ve never thought of or heard of before, that itself is a win in my book. We just take the 9 categories of activities and sort them (and give them a “paw” rating) based on which one looks like it would be best for your dog.