Green Dog Training

Are You Ready For Earth Hour?

Earlier this week we celebrated National Puppy Day in hopes of bringing awareness about the thousands of puppies in shelters needing a home.

Today we were checking out the Raise A Green Dog blog and found their article We Are Ready For Earth Hour. So what is Earth Hour? Its’ a time (1 hour to be exact) when homes and businesses come together to make their stand against climate change by doing something simple like turning their lights off for one hour.

Are You A Green Dog?

Linus, Stetson, and I have been focusing our effort on becoming green dogs (and people). So at 8:30pm tonight (March 27th, 2010) we’re going to make sure we turn off all the lights in the house for an hour.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much time to prepare for this years Earth Hour. However, Gracie over at Raise A Green Dog learned a cool new trick to kick off Earth Hour.

Take a look at the second video in the post We Are Ready For Earth Hour…and actually I embedded the video in this page for everyone to see:

Yep, that’s Gracie from Raise A Green Dog learning how to turn off the lights to kick off Earth Hour. Pretty cool trick Gracie!

How about you? Are you going to participate in Earth Hour?

Do You Leave Music On For Your Dog?

During my lunch hour I was reading the book Green Dog, Good Dog and trying to learn more about how to turn Stetson and Linus into eco-friendly dogs. By the way, Green Dog, Good Dog has lots of great tips on how to reduce your dog’s carbon pawprint and one of the great things I like about this particular book is that they have 4 different levels of involvement. That is, you don’t have to go from one extreme to another. Instead you can choose to make a more gradual transition on your journey to becoming an Eco Dog or move more rapidly.

Back to my story…one of the sections in this book talks about the benefits of leaving music on for your dog when you leave the house. Is it beneficial to your dog? or is it a waste of electricity and and making us eco-unfriendly dogs?

image by by Kema Keur

Do I Leave Music On For My Dogs?

Until today I never really thought too much about the consequences of leaving the radio on for the dogs when I left the house. I always thought it was a good idea not only because it could be soothing for the dog, but also because it drowned out any noise or activity happening outside the house that might excite or frighten my dogs.

I did take one step towards a greener life-style. We chose not to leave the television on and opted to use the radio for our dogs. However, is it really helping my dogs? Are they less stressed out with the sound of music?

Here’s an excerpt from Green Dog, Good Dog:

Dr. Gerald Buchoff notes that many people leave a television or radio on for their dogs when they leave for work for extended periods of time. In his opinion “That’s an awfully wasteful activity and probably is no more entertaining for your dog than looking out the window.”

The book however recommends that if you’re going to play music then try playing harp music which is particularly soothing.

What are my final thoughts on this one? I mainly like to leave music on to drown out the noise and activity going on outside my house. Linus in particular can sometimes get stressed out when he hears noises outside the house. I’m going to try getting harp music and playing that for my two boys for the next few weeks and see if it has any noticeable effects.

How about you? Do you turn on the radio or television when you leave your dogs home alone?

By the way I’m not quite finished reading it yet, but so far I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Green Dog, Good Dog. If you’re interested in starting Eco Dog Training with your dog then you might want to go get a copy of this book.