When Jaymi Heimbuch got her Border Collie–Cattle Dog mix, Niner, she knew she had a challenge on her hands — the dog was high energy.
“This dog needed daily mental and physical challenges,” she writes on Huffington Post. “Incredibly smart, relentlessly energetic, and with an indefatigable drive for work, I needed to come up with ways for him to be happy living in a city.”
So she turned her daily walk into a urban agility course, making use of all the curbs, stairs, benches, ledges, and planters in picturesque San Francisco — she even wrote an how-to about it for the Mother Nature Network.
By and by, however, she realized something: Her dog loved to balance on things. And he was good at it, so she began to incorporate it into her training.
“Little by little we worked on teaching him where his back feet are, how to get all four feet onto a little surface, jumping onto small platforms, balancing on shaky surfaces, climbing and, importantly, safely getting off of things,” she writes.
It worked, of course, because Niner is a really smart dog. And because San Francisco is such a pretty town, Jaymi Heimbuch has one of the best Instagrams around. Take a long look:
“We treat our 5-mile-a-day walks like a treasure hunt. He knows the look in my eye when I’ve spotted something that might be a platform, and he gets excited about where I’m going to point him,” Heimbuch writes on HuffPo. “He runs to his favorite hydrants and posts, gives me a look to make sure it’s okay, and jumps up on his own.
“Walks are now anything but boring and provide more exercise than we’d get during a simple stroll. And we always capture an iPhone snap of the best of the balancing acts he does.”
Via Huffington Post; photos via Jaymi Heimbuch‘s Instagram
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