Frankly I’ve been goofing off for several days now. Aside from a few chores I’ve just been enjoying the holiday season. I must say that I got it in my head all of a sudden to embark on a dog training lark. I’ve decided to teach my dogs to bowl! If anyone would like to play along I’ll talk through the training steps. This game was documented a very long time ago in the Clean Run Workbooks; but this is the first time I’ve actually gotten serious about it. You know, one of the things we like to do for homework with our students is get them to teach the dog some silly game or skill. Aside from the obvious task of teaching dogs to “do agility” I’m also tasked with teaching my students to be dog trainers. If you give them some silly trick or game to teach their dogs you’ll see that they tend to be very good humored and relaxed about the training… (unlike “agility” where somebody has told them that they need to be intense and earnest.)

To begin…

The pin is basically a Pringles can all duck-taped. I taped a ring of heavy washers along the top of the can so that it is top-heavy and will knock over with just a little tap. The weight of the top should also serve to strike well against the other pins.

The Pin-set is fairly straight-forward. The 5-pin (foremost) and the two 3‑pins (second row) are equally 8″ apart. The 2-pins (back row) continue on a line from the center of 5 and 3-pins, and set back another 8″.

Introducing the dog to the pin…

Straightaway we should understand that we want the dog to knock over the pin. I started a couple of my dogs by putting a food treat underneath the can so they would be inclined to knock it over to get to the treat. This immediately created a bit of an undesirable performance as the dog will want to put his nose against the bottom of the can and nudge it aside.

Marsha immediately one-upped me on the basic performance by taking her clicker primed dogs who quickly learned to interact with the pins by putting their feet on the top of the can or just butting them over with their noses.

So I will defer to the idea that the dog might be trained simply by allowing them to interact with the can and giving them praise and reward them they knock it over. Here my boy Bogie is studying the problem, knowing that I’m prepared to reward him for something…

When he knocks it over I praise and reward him. We have to repeat this step over and over until he learns to run to the pin very aggressively and just knock it down.

Multiple pins…

When I introduce multiple pins it’s desirable to make them fairly easy to knock down. So they are set much more closely together than them will be ultimately.

Once again I have to give my dog a chance to interact with the multiple pins.

For right now I continue to reward for knocking any or all of the pins. I’ll worry about asking him to knock everything down at once.

We just keep doing it over and over again. Ultimately I settled on giving a small treat for knocking anything down, and a bit of a jackpot for knocking everything down.

5-Pins…

Once again, these pins are set more closely together than they will ultimately be. It’s my objective to allow my dog to be successful knocking down as many as possible.

It’s pretty clear that the physics of this game are going to be very different from real bowling where you get to throw a ball. I envision some very interesting splits.

Regulation Pin Set…

I really haven’t spent enough time training any of my dogs yet at this game. Well, I’ve been at it for all of three days, after all. But Bogie is a good boy and I figure at this very moment probably the #1 5-Pin Bowling dog in America.

Rules of the Game

5-Pin Bowling is a uniquely Canadian variation of bowling. I reckon that I’ll pretty much subscribe to the Canadian rules of scoring, with a couple of chief differences. I’ve already mentioned that the pins are only 8″ apart. Also the lane will only be 30′ long. I also figure that I’ll have to take a unique approach to the “foul line”. In addition to the handler/bowler’s foul line… I’m going to add a second line 6′ from the #5 pin. After the dog crosses that line the handler can make no second command either verbally or by hand signal. This will be deemed a fault, and handled as such in the scoring (about the same as a gutter ball).

I’ll publish the rules in more complete form as I go along.