# 2 year old just can't chill out



## hansmike (Apr 12, 2021)

Our 2 year old, Summit, is a min/maxer. She's either balls to wall crazy, or sleeping. Over time, we realized that in certain situations, she just incapable of chilling out. She is extremely well loved, spoiled, and gets plenty of daily exercise. A typical day usually involves 45 minutes to an hour of off-leash hike in the morning and maybe a trip to the dog park or another short walk/run in the afternoon. Here are a couple scenarios to show what I mean:

Summit, my wife, and I went on a 16 mile (mostly off-leash) overnight backpacking trip in the mountains. Following, we returned to the campground we were staying at. Put her on a long line and she was just non-stop walking around, sniffing, went for a couple walks with her, curious about whatever for the entire rest of the day. Evening rolls around, have a campfire going, have her own personal dog cot she can lay on with her bed and blankets on it besides us. Nope, laying down outside is not for her. She paws at the tent to get in to go to bed, so we let her.

Another situation. The other night the three of us go to a brewery to have a couple beers outside. We have one of those corkscrew things that anchor into the ground and attach her leash to it so she has a good 12 foot circle she can roam around. She's usually pretty calm at home after 6pm, but at the brewery it's a different story. Anticipating how much of a pain she's going to be, we bring her a marrow bone to keep her busy. That lasts about an hour. It's now 7:30 she's bored with the bone, bored with the brewery, doesn't want to lay on the blanket, and just starts pacing and barking non-stop. There are other dogs at the brewery (that she's not interested with) that are all just laying there on the grass, being normal dogs. She clearly wants to leave, so we do. We get home a few minutes later and she falls right asleep on the couch.

Is this a common Vizsla thing? We love her to death but sometimes I wish she could just chill out when she's not at home. She gets ample exercise, I feel like this may be more of an anxiety thing or maybe overstimulation. Is there some way we can train her to chill or relax?


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## samdora7 (Jun 13, 2019)

I’m curious to what others have to say as I don’t have that much experience, but for us practice to calm down has been a game changer. There are many exercises to achieve this but we used a cushion to indicate his calm place. 

We now take that cushion with us wherever we go and after he sniffs around and chews a bit on a bone or whatever we brought along, he settles on his cushion and zooms out for 1-2 hours. It doesn’t have to be a cushion of course, it can be anything like a blanket, towel, scarf etc. as long as he can recognize it as his safe calm zone. 

I must say we’ve been practicing with him from early age and at 1yr8months now he’s pretty easy to take with us anywhere. 


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## Dan_A (Jan 19, 2021)

Check out teaching the “place” command with a cot or dog bed. A lot of resources out there for this. Kind of a “hey you need to be here awhile so relax, you can sit stand , lay, whatever but chill here till we say so” type thing.


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