Blond fur flying gracefully, Lizzie the Golden Retriever leaps through the tire jump, scurries through the first tunnel and times her bar jump perfectly. Then, rounding the corner, she scampers past the second tunnel.

“Lizzie, this way!” directs her handler, circling her arm toward the tunnel entrance. Lizzie watches, wags and then seems to make a decision: she dashes gleefully toward the trees. Everyone on the course laughs.

Normally, this behavior on an agility course would earn major faults, but here, it’s all part of the fun—and the therapy.

Lizzie is a participant in Abilities Through Agility, a unique program that combines kids, therapy dogs and an agility course to help the children achieve their physical, occupational (focused on improving motor functions and everday activities/interactions) and speech-therapy goals.

The program began over a picnic table at the dog park, a brainstorm shared by Anne Bates, a physical therapist at ChildServe (childserve.org), the rehabilitative-services facility in Johnston, Iowa, where the program takes place, and Nicole Shumate, founder of Paws & Effect (paws-effect.org), a nonprofit that trains therapy and service dogs. Shumate, who had seen a television program that featured an autistic boy and his dog participating in agility trials, imagined starting a similar program. Bates agreed, but wondered, “Do we have to limit it to autism?”

In January 2007, they launched Abilities Through Agility (ATA) with just four children. Now, the program has grown to four sessions each week, serving kids with severe injuries as well as degenerative, developmental, chromosomal and other disorders.

With three children, three therapists, two to three dogs and their handlers, three rehab techs, and a few parents in attendance, the sessions are “exercises in controlled chaos,” according to Bates. “It’s structured, but that structure’s hidden underneath.” In this setting, agility obstacles mask sometimes mundane or frustrating therapy obstacles, and the dogs motivate the children to overcome them.

This session starts with setting up the jumps, which requires physical and occupational skills. Alex, a 14-year-old with purple- and blue-streaked hair, wheels the uprights down the sidewalk in her wheelchair. “You’ll have to use your muscles,” says her therapist.

“I left ’em at home, sorry!” calls Alex.

Alex, who has Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T), a rare genetic neurodegenerative disease, doesn’t actually mind the difficult task of transporting and handing off the uprights. She’s motivated to set up so that she can direct a dog through the course. “Kids are more likely to do things for the dogs than probably anyone else,” says Alex’s father, Greg Champion.

“You don’t notice you are actually working as much,” adds Alex.

Part of the program consists of the participants simply keeping up with their four-legged therapists as they dash through the course. While some run alongside their dogs, Alex pushes herself down the sidewalk that cuts through the course. At one point, Finn, her Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier partner, scampers to the top of the dogwalk, then half-turns to check on Alex’s progress. Seeing her far behind, Finn freezes, and Alex shakes her head and laughs as she propels herself toward him.

When it’s Kylie’s turn to run with Finn, she must first unhook the leash from his collar—a difficult maneuver. Kylie, Finn’s handler and the therapist all lean toward his curly neck as Kylie releases the latch. Then, the normally quiet 10-year-old girl sends Finn through the tire triumphantly—“Jump, Finn!”—punctuating the command with a thrust of her arm.

The children’s physical cues, whether pointing or arm motions, help them progress toward, and sometimes showcase the achievement of, their occupational therapy goals, as does rewarding the dogs; working a treat from palm to fingertips increases dexterity. Petting the dogs, one of the simple joys of human/canine interaction, also promotes dexterousness.

The kids clearly demonstrate their speech therapy work through the commands that ring out in conjunction with the physical cues—“Jump! Tunnel! Up! This way!”—. “They have to speak loudly and with authority for the dogs to respond,” says Champion.

As Lizzie did during her unscheduled frolic break, the dogs sometimes add to the speech-therapy load by misbehaving (“No! Come back, Lizzie!”). “I don’t care,” says Bates of the canine naughtiness. “I’m not looking for the most obedient dogs. From a speech perspective, [the kids] have to learn to re-ask—the appropriate way to get [the dogs’] attention.”

Therapists capitalize on surprises and routine tasks alike to incorporate the agility course into the kids’ overall therapy goals. Even the dogs’ well-deserved water break provides the children with opportunities to develop their skills and abilities; they have to manipulate water-bottle caps and squeeze hard to fill the bowls. The children seem proud to be able to offer their special partners a cool drink.

In addition to ATA, ChildServe offers other animal-assisted therapy, such as animal interactions during individual therapy sessions, as well as animal-assisted activity, like visits from a dog to a patient’s room. These interactions occur sporadically, though, while  ATA pairs meet weekly to develop the bond between child and dog. The first 10 weeks a pair works together can be hectic, as each learns the other’s cues and capabilities. “But eventually … it clicks, and the dog starts listening to the child versus the handler,” says Bates.

Alex and her regular dog, Blue, have clearly clicked; when Bates tells her that Blue will be back in January, Alex breaks out in a huge smile. Blue, who sustained a back injury, was temporarily absent from the program and Alex had been sharing both Lizzie and Finn with the kids in her session.

“Kids know their dogs,” says Bates.

Kylie’s reaction to Finn’s no-show at the beginning of the session illuminates the strength of the bond they’ve developed over two years. “Where’s Finn?” she worries. Told he’ll probably come soon, she asks over and over, “But when?” When Finn arrives, Kylie brightens immediately, calling his name as she runs to him. She sinks her hands into his wavy fur and lovingly strokes his back.

“It’s a special bond,” says Champion of the connection between the child handlers and “their” dogs. His older daughter, Paige, who also has A-T and participated in ATA, connected so deeply with her dog Jessie that the yellow Labrador appears with her in her senior pictures.

These bonds allow the dogs to adapt and listen to handlers who aren’t their caregivers. “Dogs can adapt to just about anything in life. The bond will grow simply because the dog is having fun with the handler,” explains Pia Silvani, a well-known certified dog trainer.

Thanks to the bonds forged by teamwork and the clever strategies employed in these group agility sessions, the children reach their goals.At that point, they graduate from the program, leaving space for new members. However, kids can’t graduate fast enough to meet demand. The program currently serves 12 children, with 10 more on the waiting list. “It could be a few years,” says Bates. “We’d love to have a group every night, but we have to have the dogs.”

Bates leans on Shumate at Paws & Effect to recruit both volunteers and dogs. On her part, Shumate hopes to obtain corporate sponsorships to offset the cost of agility- and therapy-dog training classes for potential volunteers. She would also like to expand the program to another arena: the Special Olympics. “[Her idea] is that the kids will use agility through their lives, and have it be their sport,” says Bates.

Regardless of the venue, when these dogs and children appear on the agility course, the focus won’t be on times, faults or medals. As the teams conquer the course, they’re really overcoming the real-life challenges the children face. Improvement in the young handlers’ abilities and the loving bonds that develop between them and their canine therapists are part and parcel of their success.

When I wrote about the ways my dogs have helped me connect with other pet lovers, it made me think about how many experiences in my life that I have my pets to thank for.

The first time I drove a car by myself was to go to a pet first aid class at a local community college. The first time I used a power tool was to attach jump cup strips to my agility jumps. And the first time I finished an official race, I had Nemo to thank for running every step of the way with me. Sense a trend?

My dogs have inspired me to learn new things and embark on adventures that enrich our lives together. Studies have shown that dog lovers are more active than the average person, but I think that our relationship with our pups extends beyond increased physical activity. My dogs give me unconditional love and I want to be the best person I can be for them.

Does your dog inspire you to learn new skills or test the limits of your abilities?

For a young Maasai girl in rural Kenya, the future often looks like this: If her parents can afford high school, her brothers will attend in her place. At puberty, she’ll be forced into an arranged marriage to a much older man, as his second or third wife. She’ll be expected to bear as many children as possible. Once a mother, she will be in no position to educate her children or improve her family’s standard of living.

“But if you get a Maasai girl through high school, she’s probably going to pick her own husband, probably going to be the only wife, and probably will have far fewer children,” says Debby Rooney, cofounder of BEADS for Education, a nonprofit business development, conservation and education program in Isinya and the Amboseli region of Kenya. With education, she says, these girls will find careers, run businesses and take charge of their futures.

In a little more than ten years, Rooney has found a way to send 127 Maasai girls to private school, and her success has a most unlikely launching pad: dog collars.

As a New Jersey–based environmental educator traveling frequently to Kenya, Rooney recognized that many tribal families wanted to educate their daughters but couldn’t afford to. She decided to help create a sustainable solution—a community-based micro enterprise for Maasai women, most of whom were illiterate and had no business experience.

One day in the early ’90s, she took a friend and drove down a dirt road south of Nairobi, stopping to talk to the first woman they saw beading. “We asked her if she’d like to bead dog collars, which is a hysterical thought,” says Rooney, who’d realized that collars might have a better profit margin than belts. “They don’t name their dogs, feed their dogs, and rarely put collars on them. It’s a ridiculous idea. But that’s where it started.”

Since 1993, the 25 beaders in the Dupoto Women’s Group have been creating dog collars with tribal, snake and traditional patterns for sale halfway around the world. They live with their families in traditional mud huts or small wood and metal homes on dry plains. Gazelles, zebras and other wildlife from nearby Nairobi National Park migrate through their lands.

In the past, the women would attempt to sell their beadwork at crowded tourist markets—mostly in vain. Through BEADS (Beads for Education, Advancement, Development and Success), their collars and other beaded products are sold online and at a few museum and zoo shops in the U.S. All of the profit is returned to the women. It is their primary source of income and helps underwrite school fees.

“But it’s not just a financial difference,” says Karen Zulauf, co-owner of Safari Africa, an adventure travel company that began arranging small group visits to the Dupoto project last summer. “The whole program really transforms these women. It takes them from soft-spoken and retiring to people who are positive about themselves and positive about the progress their families can make.”

In 1998, Rooney expanded the program's reach by launching a direct sponsorship component. Sponsors commit to sending a girl to private school at a cost of roughly $30 per month. BEADS, which is affiliated with the Africa Wildlife Foundation and the International Women’s Democracy Center, also supports AIDS/HIV training, conservation education and internships.

The headmaster at a BEADS-affiliated school recently told Zulauf, it’s time to sponsor boys. “Now we have all these really intelligent girls and we have no one for them to marry,” he told her with a smile. “Once our girls get educated, they want to marry an educated man.”

It’s the sort of problem Debby Rooney will be happy to tackle next.

Like most dog people, I do not live on a farm, nor do I have l ivestock, unless you count the chipmunks squatting in our garage. This is one of the great disappointments of my dog Ginger Peach’s life. She’ll herd anything — people, other dogs, Jolly Balls, even the cats. Our friends in law enforcement insist she’s a Dutch Shepherd mix. No doubt she’d love to be out rounding up bad guys.

Short on both sheep and criminals, I eagerly signed us up for a Treibball (pronounced “try ball”) workshop at Wiggles ‘n’ Wags in Lombard, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. A new sport, Treibball is best described as urban herding: from varying distances, you direct your dog to move large exercise balls into a goal, like herding sheep into a pen. All dogs are welcome to play, regardless of breed or age. While the distance skills and verbal cues are similar to those used in agility, Treibball makes almost no physical demands on the handler, and so people of any age and athletic ability can play.

Treibball, also known as drive-ball, originated in Germany six years ago when Dutch dog trainer Jan Nijboer watched his Australian Cattle Dogs push their rubber water dishes around the field after finishing herding lessons. The dogs, who clearly still had energy to spare, had created their own game. He wondered if they would also push large exercise balls, and found that they easily took to the new “sheep.” After Nijboer introduced the game to his herding students, it quickly spread across Europe and then to the United States. In 2007, Sweden hosted the inaugural international Treibball competition.

American Treibball Association (ATA) founder Dianna Stearns first saw drive-ball videos in 2009. As a positive-reinforcement trainer, she appreciated Nijboer’s emphasis on a respectful relationship between dog and handler. “I could see it being used as a positive teaching tool,” says Stearns. “[It’s] fun, fosters a stronger bond without corrections or punishment, [and] improves communication skills and enhances a dog’s off-leash reliability.

“As a trainer and behavior consultant, a lot of the behavior problems I’m asked to address stem from the sad effects of dogs who are bored … who are expected to simply lie [around] while their owners watch TV,” says Stearns. “Most dogs are problem solvers. They need an outlet for their intelligence and energy before it gets funneled into destructive chewing, digging, barking and fence running.”

Stearns enjoys the challenge of Treibball with her own four dogs: Terry, a still-feisty 13-year-old Westie; Chance, a nine-year-old Black Lab/German Shorthaired Pointer mix and demo dog extraordinaire; Huerro, a sweet, sixyear- old yellow Lab; and Fin, a one-yearold Border Collie/Aussie mix who, she jokes, is “currently suffering from teenage brain.” (Watch Stearns and Fin in action at youtube.com/americantreibball.)

“Chance and Fin have different approaches to the balls and to the game,” says Stearns. “I’ve had to adapt my training to each of their different learning styles. Because Treibball is a problem-solving game [in which the handler directs] the dog to go after a specific ball depending on where that ball rolls, both handler and dog must continually correct their positioning. It’s been a major problem-solving exercise in creative thinking and teaching.”

That was certainly the case when Ginger Peach (GP) and I followed our Treibball instructor’s directions. Since we have competitive agility and discdog backgrounds, the verbal and physical cues I used were different than those suggested in class. I made some adjustments and decided how to match up cues GP already knew with the various Treibball maneuvers. GP took it all in stride, eager to work on “sends” to her mat from 15 feet away and down on command at varying distances, and to target various objects — even a toy dump truck! — in preparation for our first ball.

We both pouted when we realized we wouldn’t get a ball right away, but like any canine sport, it’s important to master foundation skills first. Also, GP habitually retrieves her Jolly Balls with her mouth, which is frowned upon in Treibball. A dog who bites the ball will be eliminated; driving must be done with the nose only.

Through the ATA, Stearns hopes to offer a solution for high-energy dogs whose owners cannot match their activity level. “Our sedentary lifestyles are often at odds with what our dogs were bred or have evolved to do,” she says. “Most dogs need a job, and a thinking job or game that increases their bond with their owner in a nonaversive manner is a natural.”

The ATA, a young organization, is in the process of training Treibball instructors to increase the number of classes being offered around the country. Members are also drafting official rules for competition, which Stearns says will likely debut in early 2012. And Treibball enthusiasts will soon be able to register their dogs and earn points toward titles.

Ideally, GP’s and my skills will have progressed so that we’ll be ready to compete. Some of our classmates plan to play just for fun. Whether you pursue Treibball competitively or recreationally, suburban and city dogs will enjoy the physical and mental stimulation of tending to their inflatable ball flock.