It’s tough to stay active in the winter — even when you’re a dog.
Brian Keith Einarson knows this all too well. Living in Winnipeg, Canada, he and his three pups brave five months of cold weather every year. He was struggling to keep his senior dogs healthy and fit when they’d much rather snooze all day, so he decided to give them a little incentive to go out in the cold.
Brian Keith Einarson
Einarson’s genius plan? Turn his yard into a winter wonderland of snow tunnels.
Brian Keith Einarson
Building the snow tunnels began as a way to make cleaning up after his pets easier.
“I’m a truck driver and I would get home at night when it’s dark out, and it’s hard to find the poop. So I just made paths so I could find it,” Einarson told The Dodo. “Otherwise, it’s springtime, you would have a pretty big mess out there, and it’s not very appealing.”
Eventually, he turned the paths into tunnels of packed snow to make it more fun for his dogs to navigate.
He hired some neighborhood kids who worked on the project after school, and within a month he had a palace of snow.
According to Einarson, it’s not too difficult to engineer the tunnels if you have the right material to work with. ”You make a pile of snow and you let that sit for a week or two,” Einarson said. ”Then you can start digging holes in the piles and what you dig out you put on top. Each hole took about ten minutes to make, so with three of them it took 20 hours to do it after school.”
Even with a fun playground outside, the pups still needed another reason to get excited about negative 40-degree weather. And nothing motivates them more than some healthy treats hidden inside and on top of the tunnels.
“They watch from the window as I put treats all over the place,” Einarson said. ”As soon as they see me come and open the door it’s a mad dash for each dog to get as many treats as they can. They run by and grab them and keep running.”
When his pups start to get cold, they know to come to the door and their dad will let them back in the home so they can take a nice long rest until it’s time to play again.