Puppy Events: The Feel-Good Chemicals We All Need

You might have heard of puppy yoga. Generally, you spend 30 minutes on yoga exercise and another 30 minutes playing with puppies. These puppies usually come from breeders, so each event features a specific breed.

Puppy Yoga Club holds these in a number of cities, including New York, throughout California, and in Boca Raton, Florida. I know that leaves a lot of you out, so check search engines for possible events happening in your area.

In New York City, my personal favorite is Puppy Jam. Held in a photography studio near Union Square, it includes a glass of wine, a live musician, and of course – puppies. You get to spend about an hour with the puppies, and the groups of people are small. This allows for a lot of play time.

Puppy Jam also has VIP tickets, which provide you with an additional 15 minutes of time with the puppies. I’ve done the VIP thing three times, and each time, I had 2-4 puppies all to myself for that period. Below is a video of some of my VIP time with dachshunds.

Most of the puppies are 8-10 weeks old, and like with Puppy Yoga, they usually come from breeders. Puppy Jam generally discloses the breed a day or two before each event. They have also held “rescue jams” with shelter dogs that need to be adopted.

For the breeders, these events are advantageous because it gives them a chance to socialize their puppies. For this reason, some of the young dogs I’ve encountered have been a bit shy at first.

My first experience with Puppy Jam was a rescue event with a number of different breeds. Some were puppies, while others were as old as two years. Only the youngest puppies were shy. The rest were ready to play.

At other Puppy Jam events, I have spent time with corgis, dachshunds, and Samoyeds. Check out a video of one of the corgi pups below.

My favorites were the dachshunds. While they were shy in the beginning, as soon as they learned about the wonder of belly rubs, they plopped over on their backs repeatedly, begging for pets. The video below shows the high energy dachshund puppies at play.

But all of my experiences with the puppies have been wonderful. Every time, it floods my system with feel-good chemicals, which is exactly the kind of infusion we all seem to need these days.

So if you’re a dog person, I can’t recommend events like this enough if there’s one happening near you. Watch a final video of the Samoyed puppies at Puppy Jam.