1. Agility
Wish you could take your dog to the gym with you? Cancel your membership and sign up for agility class! Great exercise for you and your dog, agility challenges your dog to a variety of different obstacles such as jumps, tunnels, teeter-totters, weave poles and much more. You will learn how to communicate with your dog, effective handling skills, and how to run fast while talking! Any breed and size of dog can compete in agility as long as they are 6+ months.
2. Obedience and Rally-O
Yes, being obedient is a sport! After you’ve completed some basic obedience courses with your dog, there is a whole new world of competitive obedience you can enter. Obedience trials focus on the perfection of obedience skills. Depending what level you compete at, the skills become harder. Rally-O is a more relaxed version of competitive obedience where you and your dog navigate through a course of signs, each sign you have to stop at, complete an obedience task, and then move forward to the next sign.
3. Therapy Work
After you and your dog have completed some obedience classes, you may consider furthering your dog’s education and certifying him to be able to do therapy work! Therapy work varies and can consist of visiting hospitals, retirement homes, schools and much more. If therapy work is something you are interested in you will likely need to get your dog tested with a recognized group.
4. Flyball
Have a dog that just won’t stop bringing you his ball? Flyball should probably be your sport of choice. Flyball is run in teams of 4 dogs, as a relay. One at a time, the dogs complete 4 jumps, hit the Flyball box, catch a tennis ball, and come back over the 4 jumps with the ball. The dogs race against another team of 4 dogs and whichever team is the fastest wins the heat.
Flyball is an ideal sport for friendly, high energy dogs of any size and age!
