Popular stunt dog show makes return to Olympia

“Stunt Dog Experience” creator Chris Perondi has a dozen dogs, and they’re his pets as well as the stars of his show, stopping in Olympia on Sunday.

“I’m sitting on the couch right now, and I have five dogs around me, maybe six,” Perondi said in a phone interview last week. “I’m looking at two dozen dog bones and toys all over the floor. When they wake up in the morning, they open their toy box, and by the time breakfast is over, they have toys all over the place.”

But he and wife, Suhey Perondi, of Stockton, California, are used to the chaos. “They’re our kids,” Chris Perondi said. “They love their off time, and they enjoy performing, too.”

Audiences enjoy it as well. The dogs sold out two shows in Olympia in 2013 and two more in Tacoma last year.

“They are one of our most frequently requested groups to bring back,” said Anne Larsen, marketing director at The Washington Center for the Performing Arts.

All of the stunt dogs — who race and perform high jumps, tricks and acrobatic moves — were adopted from pounds, shelters and people who rescued the animals from life on the street.

One of the show’s stars is Crazy Confetti, a Jack Russell-cattle dog-terrier mix best known for her “pawstand” — a handstand on the palm of Perondi’s hand. In May, she was featured on Nat Geo Wild’s “World’s Greatest Dogs,” which called her “a real trickster.” She was also featured in USA Today.

Confetti was in a shelter in Woodland, California, when Perondi adopted her.

“Three times she was adopted and returned,” he said. “Her days were numbered. The shelter operator contacted me because a couple of weeks before that I’d been looking for a dog that could jump high.

“She called me and said ‘I have this great dog. I think she’d be a great performing dog for you.’ ”

While she wasn’t destined to be a high jumper, Confetti showed great potential. “She was so excited about toys and playing and tugging, and that’s exactly what I look for,” Perondi said.

Perondi has his own rescue story. He used to work full time in information technology. Then he got a dog, Pepper, and got interested in training him to catch flying discs.

He was my first performing dog,” Perondi said. “He pretty much changed my life.”

In the first competition Perondi and Pepper attended, the dog took second place. And in the second, they came in first. “That got me fired up,” he said.

Things took off from there, and in 2001, he quit his job, sold his house, bought an RV and took his show on the road.

These days, he supervises three teams of dogs that perform a total of 550 shows a year in theaters; at amusement parks, festivals and zoos; and on TV. Perondi and pups have shown their stuff to Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and Queen Latifah, who called the dogs “pawtastic.”

This story was originally published November 18, 2015 at 7:15 PM with the headline "Popular stunt dog show makes return to Olympia."