Like other canine sporting activities, agility sports promote a dog’s physical and mental health. They offer an excellent opportunity to alleviate boredom, minimize destructive habits around the home, exercise, and stay fit and healthy.
Suppose your puppy has been barking excessively lately and engaging in unfavorable acts like digging, tearing, biting, and aggressively chewing things. In that case, it probably needs an outlet for the pent-up energy. Consult your vet to have your fur baby screened for potential health issues, both physical and mental, to seek remedies for the negative behavior.
Pet insurance for dogs helps provide your canine pet with quality medical care during accidents, allergies, specific illnesses, and emergencies. Consider buying cheap pet insurance so your pet pooch is covered for basic health benefits at affordable costs. Meanwhile, read this article to learn a few agility sporting skills you can teach your puppy.
Agility training benefits
Aside from its physical health benefits, agility training helps improve a puppy’s sociability. Attending practice sessions and competitions allows a puppy to meet new faces, both people and animals. Since a puppy receives much positive reinforcement during these events, it can grow into a strong and confident dog that becomes more comfortable with interacting with strangers in new scenarios.
Consider enrolling your pup in dog agility classes or buying agility equipment quickly online or in physical stores. Set up practice courses and obstacles at home to introduce the sport to your puppy who is new to agility training. Treats can come in handy during the sessions and don’t forget to teach your canine pal the below-mentioned basic agility skills.
1. Awareness
Puppies lack body awareness; while their front paws lead, the rest of their bodies follow. When it comes to agility sports, your fur baby must know where each paw is placed to cross the obstacles successfully. Several techniques help raise your four-legged companion’s awareness of its body and surroundings.
The first few lessons will be about training your puppy to perch on different objects. Help your puppy interact with a footstool, inverted plastic bin, upside-down box, etc. Your puppy must be taught to sit, stand, and leap on them with one or more paws.
Another skill you can work on is allowing your fur baby to climb inside items to help it analyse the space and body position. Turn the containers over and encourage your pet to explore them until it learns to fit its body inside comfortably. Arrange a line of boxes and coach your fur baby to step through it. Crawling and stepping through the ladder are other things you can teach your fur companion.
2. Attention
This is a team sport, and your puppy needs a handler’s guidance, so it knows what step to take next while running around the obstacle course. It is essential to train your pup to focus on you despite the many attractive things or distractions in the area. Teach making “Eye contact”, and use commands like “Look here”, “Watch me” or “Eyes on me” to accomplish the same. Begin training in quiet places and slowly move on to adding distractions or practicing in distraction-filled locations.
3. Jumps
The bar must be on the ground initially, especially when training smaller dog breeds. Place the bar one or two inches above the ground when training medium or large dogs. Keep your pet on a leash and teach it to leap, so it doesn’t go around the hurdle. Practice in a narrow corridor, make a small forward jump on one side and ask your dog to do the same on the other side. Shower your pup with treats and praises at every successful attempt to encourage jumping.
4. Tunnels
Passing through these obstacles is easy to teach and fun for a puppy to learn. Start with a short tunnel; your puppy can quickly enter, vanish, and reappear. Once your canine pet masters entering and exiting short tunnels, you can move on to adding longer and curved tunnels to the course.
With any kind of sport, there are certain risks. You can’t rule out accidents, injuries, falls, and other emergencies during a mock training session or an actual event. It is one reason you should consider being prepared with cheap pet insurance, at least. Pet insurance for dogs makes it much easier to provide timely health care with a little economic hassle, which is why you should explore it.
