Doggie Games

What a fun night, well mostly. I got to see a whole bunch of my buddies from agility. We are participating in a new class for winter-time, indoors play. It's like advanced obedience, because we have to be really good at stuff off leash. Tonight, we did all kinds of things--heeling, conga lines, stand-stays with everybody walking around, down-stays with everybody walking around and picking us up one at a time. All that stuff was a piece of cake for us. The Boss was amazed and a little baffled because she thought we would have to spend more time on what she calls "precision obedience". Hey, we know what we're doing, so no prob.

Then she started playing games with us. One was called "Airport". That's where we were in a sit stay with our people all around the edge of the room (it's a double-garage, pretty small and there were 8 of us). In Airport, two people leave their dogs, go to the middle of the room and jump up and down, getting excited like they haven't seen each other in years. Then, it's 4 people doing that, then 6, then all 8. I did pretty well. Mom was in the 4, then in the 6, but when everybody got up and was jumping up and down in the middle of the room and just us dogs were sitting around the edge of the room, I just couldn't sit still any more. I had to get in there, too. So, that's something Mom has to work on--a sit stay with people getting all excited a few feet away from me.

The other game we played was called "Duel". Mom and Helen had their backs to each other, left Bernie and me in sit/stay, then walked to the wall and turned around. On the Boss' command, they gave us the hand signal for "drop" (no words). Bernie and I hit the deck. Everybody else played the game too and they all did great. We are such good dogs...that was pretty easy though.

The boss has more games to challenge us, like musical chairs. She also asked everybody in the class to think up games to make us do what we know how to do but to make us think and follow directions under all kinds of different situations meant to distract us. Does any body know games like that? We'd like more ideas.

Barked by: Jolanda (Dogster Member)

January 15th 2010 at 12:06 pm