Obstacle course

This game is nice because you don’t need any expensive agility hurdles. Instead you can use any light weight or soft objects you can find in your home.

You should make the obstacle course into a corridor or some other narrow place, so that your dog won’t circle around the obstacles.

You can use empty cardboard boxes, pillows, cushions, footstools, buckets, wash basins, folded blankets, a sporting bag filled with clothes, a beach ball, stuffed animals, a laundry basket, rolled rugs etc.

You shouldn’t use any hard or heavy objects so that your dog doesn’t accidentally hurt himself. Also you shouldn’t use tables or chairs, because your dog might accidentally hurt himself by running towards chair’s or table’s legs.

I used different sized cardboard boxes, cardboard tubes, puzzle mat pieces, plastic containers, pillows and Miki’s protective collar.

You should make the obstacle course to kind of a zig zag, so that your dog needs to turn right and left several times and also that he needs to walk over some small or soft obstacles like small pillows or cardboard tubes. And you need to make the path wide enough, so your dog can walk through it without knocking the obstacles over. I also made two dead-ends in the course, which are not necessary.

You can play the game with or without another person. If you play this game with another person like I did, you can both go to different ends of the course and call the dog to come in turns. If you don’t have a friend to play this game with, you can simply tell your dog to wait on the other end, and then call the dog to come.

Miki loved this game so much, that he didn’t have patience to wait while the other one of us called him, but instead he ran through the course over and over again. It took Miki some time to realize, that the only way he can get the treats we were holding, is to wait to be called.