Facebook Training Challenges

So, a few days ago, I posted a status update on Facebook. It went something like:

"Think I can teach Pallo to stick his nose in a bowl of water and blow bubbles before the end of the night?"

The first comment on this status was a friend of mine, who simply said "dare ya."

Hah! Well, I couldn't resist daring her back, to try to teach HER dog to blow bubbles before I could teach MY dog to do it. She took up the challenge and we invited a few other facebook friends to participate as well. In all, I think we had five people take up that challenge late on a Thursday evening. And, we all had a total blast.

We all successfully trained this trick not just in that one night, but in about 10 minutes for each of us. We all ended up totally soaked, and all had a ton of fun. I don't think any of us thought, starting out, that blowing bubbles would be such a fast and easy trick to train. Or that we would have such fun training it.

A few minutes after we finished with training bubbles, one of the participants had an awesome idea. That we should have a Facebook group specifically for doing training challenges like this. So, before I even did anything else, I went and created one. And now, I invite you to join us.

The basic is pretty simple. Members of the group can create events where they give a time period and a trick to train, and everyone who wants to "attend" the event simply does their best to train their dog to do the suggested trick in the time allotted. Three types of challenges exist:

Blitz: Super fast, low-or-no notice challenge
Challenge: Notice of 12 hours or more, up to a few hours of training time
Epic: a trick that will require many hours of training over the course of days or weeks

So, if you are interested in joining us and are on facebook, come on over! The only purpose of this group is to have fun with dog training and help motivate each other to get up and do some silly fun training. No politics, no training discussions outside of the challenges, just good clean fun with a common goal.