How to Teach a Guinea Pig to Weave Poles

Weaving around poles is a fun and flashy trick for all types of animals. Weave poles are a great addition to an agility course for guinea pigs, or as a stand alone trick. Weaving is usually not the easiest trick to teach though, so it is best to start an agility course simply with some different types of jumps and tunnels before thinking about adding any weave poles or A-frame type of obstacles. Check out the video below for some tricks and tips for teaching the weave poles.

As mentioned above, weaving isn't the quickest or easiest trick to teach, and it does involve patience and repetition to get to the final result. You will likely be working on the weave poles for a couple weeks at least. If you want to make the obstacle a little bit easier, you can teach your guinea pig to go through the poles just once (instead of going down and back) or you can use fewer poles for your finished trick.

It is important that you don't reward the guinea pig at the same pole every time. Sometimes guinea pigs will try to anticipate where they will get a treat, and try to skip other poles so they can get to the "treat pole" faster. If your guinea pig gets certain "sticky spots" where they always try to skip the same pole every time, try to catch them before they run past the pole, and lure and reward at that spot every time until they are better at weaving through that particular spot.

I find that plastic drinking cups work great for this trick (plus, you can stack them for storage when you're done.) I used a set of green jello cups (shown above) in the video, but anything similar works great for this trick.

For more information on teaching this trick, check out the weave poles trick tutorial page.

Thanks for reading!

www.GuineaPigTricks.com