Tricks, Games, Sports

When your dog has learned how to search, this makes a great rainy day indoor exercise activity. You can also routinely scatter her meals around the yard so she has to search through the grass to find them; put her on a long line if you don't have a fence. You can also name her favorite toys and have her find them. You can even have family members and friends hide and have her find them.

Professional human athletes never skip a proper warmup. That's because research has proven, repeatedly, that preparing your muscles for upcoming physical activity reduces the risk of physical injury. And for them, an injury could impact their wallet with down time.

Humans have taken advantage of dogs' incredibly keen sense of smell over the ages for such uses as hunting, tracking lost and fugitive humans, and more recently, the detection of bombs, narcotics, and other contraband. It's well known that a dog's nose is many times sharper than our own – estimates range from 10,000 to 100,000 times superior to ours, with a far greater number and variety of scent receptors in their noses, more neurons linking the nose to the brain, and a greater proportion of their brains devoted to smell.

Every dog should be walked at least two to three minutes prior to starting activity. For more strenuous activities, walk longer and include some jogging toward the end. There is no better gait for overall exercise than a brisk walk.

too! Just about any dog

Summer! It's the perfect time for dock diving. In this canine sport (also known as dock jumping), the participating dog jumps off an elevated diving platform into a portable pool and the dog with the longest jump is deemed the winner. I think dock diving is possibly the best canine sport for spectator enjoyment. And, if you decide to compete, you can easily redline the FUN meter! Besides the joy of hanging out with my dog by a cool body of water, the one thing I love about the sport is that with just a few dog and handler skills, any person and any breed of dog and size of dog can participate.

Each month, I stand in the middle of my training center during the second session of my newest Level One class and introduce my...

The cattle dog-mix races across the turf, his claws digging into the ground, pushing hard into his next stride, building momentum, faster, faster, faster. With a final turbo blast powered by his rear legs, he pushes off the ground and vaults into the air, seemingly weightless as he stretches his neck into the sky. A sudden twist of shoulders propels his torso and hips 180 degrees as he changes direction midair and snatches the prize from the air - a simple, round plastic disc. Eyes alight with the thrill of the chase and the kill (catch), he lands nimbly and races back to his handler. Can we do it again? Can we, can we? Yeah, we can. This is the sport of disc dog. It's been around since Frisbees became popular in the early 1970s and the players' dogs chased the players' errant tosses. When a bad toss resulted in a disc rolling on its side, that was fine by Fido.

How to exercise yourself at the same time you exercise your dog was the subject of Fitness Together" in the April 2013 issue of WDJ. But there are many reasons the human half of the equation may not be up for much physical exercise

and we even managed to complete it with my lack of videography and editing skills. I am a Certified Trick Dog Instructor through DMWYD and really like the way the program gives people attainable goals to work toward with their pets."üüüüüüüüüJude Azaren (seen at a conventional agility event with her dog

One of the cool things about dogs is the variety of tasks, tricks, and trades they can learn. Dogs perform lifesaving work in search and rescue and criminal justice venues, and they are employed to detect everything from prohibited fruits, vegetables and meats in airports to termites in homes. These abilities are directly related to their sense of smell. All dogs have a highly developed sense of smell, although some breeds – primarily scenthounds and sporting dogs – show greater ability than others.

Owning an aggressive, fearful, or other type of special needs" dog is stressful. When your dog overreacts to other dogs or just the stimulus of being out in the world by barking