First time at the beach!
- Apr 22, 2025
- 2 min read
Since Seraphina lives in Israel I have to use the nature environments I have here and one of them is of course the beach.
Sooooo…..
With the help of my friend that she loves, we took Fina to the beach for the first time. I decided to take her to the beach where there are not too many people because I wanted it to be easier to handle and it’s already a big experience for her even without any more dogs or people.
Unfortunately the sound on one of the videos is broken as the mic was connected to another device 🙈 sorry about that. We started from a walk on the cliffs above the beach where she got to experience the nature, sniff and run.
It’s really important for me to allow the dog to take a lead when exploring an environment like this because I think it can really contribute to the self confidence when she see that she can do things by herself and that she is a very much capable dog. I reward a lot for coming back to me, doesn’t matter if by recall or by checkins (when the dog comes without being called) but overall - I let her run free and get to learn by herself where she is as long as it is not dangerous.
We stopped at a watching point above the beach and there we did a short training with food and toy just to make sure (as always) that the environment is never an issue.
Then we continued our walk towards the beach where she came into the water for the first time!
I was seriously proud 🤩🤩🤩
She felt a bit weird about it at first but it was only a short moment before she came into the water by herself and enjoyed it!
In the water, I don’t reward with treats because I want her to decide by herself how she feels about it and not interfere with activating the survival instinct with food so it was really nice to see how good she felt about it (and so did I until some ravens ate my sandwich)
We were out there for a total of 1.5 hours with many rests in between but when we came back home she slept for the rest of the day and didn’t even have energy to play with me at night
the day was a major success and I am really looking forward for the next time we’ll go to the beach together 😍