I never liked the clumsiness of handling long lines, and since Mia had a pretty good recall since she was a puppy, I never used one with her. Zulu is a lot more independent, and she grew up outside of a city environment, so I ended up heavily utilizing a dragline with her for the first months. There were situations when it was great, and some when I ended up removing it to keep everyone safe, and this made me realize that there are many more pros and cons to using long lines than I imagined.

Setting up a pen area for puppy Zulu was a new concept for me because Mia didn’t need one. I looked up many guides but didn’t like any of them, so here is our version with product links for everything! Disclaimer: this article contains Amazon affiliate links, which support Dog Gear Review if you purchase the product after clicking on it without costing you anything extra. Using affiliate links will never compromise us writing unbiased, honest reviews!

You decided to add a dog to your family, and now you are wondering what you actually need? Even though I went through this process with Mia already, I was debating about everything before picking up Zulu. Now that she has been here for two months, I wanted to reflect on the must-haves that really helped us during the first period. :) Disclaimer Some of the links in this aricle contain affiliate links, which supports Dog Gear Review if you purchase the product after clicking on it without costing you anything extra.

Why is Interactive Play with Our Dogs Important? Tugs, chaser toys, and retrieve are great ways to engage with our dogs, build a relationship and teach many different skills and tricks through playing. These games can also tire them both mentally and physically in a short session. Spending time with actively playing with our dogs strengthens the bond between humans and dogs, which is the basis of any other training or sport in the future.

Different Types of Enrichments Enrichment activities address different instinctual needs, like chewing, sniffing, and digging to reduce stress and make the dogs happier. Enrichment can be training new tricks or starting a new sport, walking in a different environment, letting them sniff in a park, or walking on different surfaces. What are enrichment toys? Why are they good? Enrichment toys keep dogs busy and provide different stimuli that are easy to incorporate into the daily routine to make downtime fun.

We received three unique muzzles for testing that we wanted to introduce in a separate article before writing their reviews. Muzzle training is crucial to ensure the dog will be comfortable wearing the muzzle in the future. Many think that putting a muzzle on a dog without introducing it properly will magically solve their problems, but it is more complex than that. Muzzle training can take from a few days to a few weeks, and it ends when the dog willingly puts their face in the muzzle (or doesn’t mind you putting it on) and doesn’t try to remove it.