It is a happy talent to know how to play. 

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

We were invited along to play some fun indoor parlour games with some doggie friends.

Everyone getting comfortable:

The evening is all about having fun with the skills we have learnt and using them in different ways by teaming up with our humans to complete funny tasks.  A card is picked from the pack of cards and on each card there is a description of a task which, if successfully performed, is worth ‘paw points’ according to difficulty.

You can normally tell what sort of task it is by the look on the human’s face when they read it:

The tasks include things like:

Take a ball out of bowl of yummy biscuits without eating any of them (or at least without anyone noticing)..really tricky since you need to ‘leave’ , ‘take it’ and ‘bring’ all at the same time –  so lots of paw-points for this one:

Stay in a lie down position and watch your human balance on one leg without getting up to try and knock them over…another tricky one:  

Stand up like a bear:

Pretend to be a statue?…no not really!

The French game is called Pile-Poil le Défi.

These evenings also provide a great opportunity for us to hang out and relax together with other dogs and their humans.  It’s also enjoyable since dogs have some outdoor play time together whilst our humans have their dinner & breaktimes.

We can earn some of the yummiest treats during the tasks and our humans laugh a lot – us doggies are happy when our humans are happy with us:

At the end of the game, the points are counted up and the prizes are given out to the highest scorers!

Here’s a video of a few of the tasks:

At the end of the evening (normally very late since our humans like to chat a lot!), we all go home with our goodie bags, prizes and big smiles – ready for a well-earned sleep…

ZZZzzzzzzzzzz

Playing games with lots of rules is a fun way to train your dog and exercise his/ her mind…

(Dr Ian Dunbar in Dogstardaily)