14/10/2025
If you’d have walked into my Tame That Sports Dog class at Phoenix Agility Club tonight you’d have asked me two questions.
Firstly: ‘aren’t these dogs meant to be crazy next to agility? They all seem so calm?!’ (The answer is yes but they are learning new skills!)
Secondly: ‘why do those Collies have their heads in boxes and buckets?’ Which, to be fair, is a valid question!
Tonight we worked on ‘Dopamine Boxes’. On the surface it doesn’t look like much. In the dogs brain, it is POWERFUL.
A lot of dogs, especially herding dogs, are very switched on to movement. They want to stalk and herd and CHASE! This means queueing and walking around can be a challenge at an agility show as the dog winds themselves up more and more, barking and lunging at the ring and when you finally get in, the dog has lost its mind and can no longer perform optimally.
Enter, the Dopamine Box.
It’s a simple concept. If your head is in the box, you get fed, rapid fire. All you have to do is keep your head in the box. What’s actually happening is much deeper though.
✅ We are breaking the focus on the movement in the agility ring next to us.
✅ We are teaching resilience.
✅ We are teaching commitment to an alternative task, even when the preferred option is right there next to them.
The box is clever in its simplicity. It limits sight and means we are working on mostly the sound of agility. It is such a powerful way of desensitising these particularly ‘eyebally’ dogs! We can eventually fade it out. We don’t need to take a box ringside for life! But it gives us a starting point.
Well done Reba, Flame and Brig on your first live ‘Dopamine Box’ session. Plus Penny and Teilo for their good work tonight!
