I spent the New Years holiday with my friends Eddie and Sharon.
This young couple have a two year-old Rottweiler named, “Luna” and have discovered a pretty interesting way to exercise their high energy dog.
See, Luna is a high-drive dog. That means she’s got a lot of (cough) excess energy to burn off. So Eddie and Sharon needed to find an easy way to exercise Luna at night, after they returned home from work.
Eddie showed me a laser pen he’d bought and said, “Watch this!”
We went out to the side of the house and Luna bounded along, eagerly. It was already dark outside and I kinda had a feeling as to what would happen next.
“Go get it, girl!” Eddie hollered.
And with that, he flicked on the red laser pen, made it dance around the ground a bit (Luna pounced on it!) and then ran it about 200 feet down the side of the house. Luna sped after the red light, chasing the bouncing spot with all her energy.
When she go to the end of the house, Eddie “ran” the red light back toward us, and sure enough, Luna came charging back toward us.
Back and forth, up and down.
We pulled up lawn chairs and reclined under the cool, December stars. Luna continued to chase after the red light. For twenty minutes.
Afterwards, Eddie let her “catch” the red spot and dropped a cookie on the ground for Luna.
We went inside and Luna collapsed in the corner, thoroughly exhausted. And I marveled at how a $9 laser pen could provide so many hours of pain-free exercise for both owner and dog.
“Did she chase the laser pen like this, when you first brought it home?” I asked.
“No,” replied Eddie. “In fact, there was a training process I went through to get her to learn to chase it. But now that she understands–it’s the easiest way to give her the exercise she needs–without breaking a sweat myself. In fact, it’s kind of fun!”
If you’d like to see a sample of the type of laser pen Eddie was using, click the link below: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00…Fencoding=UTF8