I’ve loved reading your comments about favorite dog toys. You all inspired me to take a photo of Willie and his current favorites. . .
From Left to Right, back row, the toys are:
Brain Twister (long, green thing, Canine Genius), Chewber (red disc), Invincible Rings (blue & black rings, JW Pet), Skinneez Stuffingless Dog Toy (long, grey thing draped onto orange) and Plush Leo with Stuffies (big, round, orange hollow globe, by Canine Genius.
The three toys in the front are Planet Dog’s Orbee Ball, Planet Dog’s Strawberry and the eternally essential Large size Kong. Please keep telling us about your favorite toys and we’ll try to get them on the website. (And our dogs will be so grateful!)
Here’s what happened when I said “Take it!” to Willie:
Right now there is no question that the Twister is his favorite toy, but then, Will LOVES to shake things. (I helped this along by reinforcing it as a way to help Will literally and metaphorically shake off tension, and as a way to learn to calm down when aroused.) It is also new, and I have no doubt that has an impact too.
Every morning Will and Lassie start the day by eating frozen food out of their Kong… I let them outside to pee and they run in, run to the frig and wait for me to hand them their frozen Kong. It takes them a good 25-30 minutes (lucky me!) to get through the food I have carefully smashed into the Kong the night before.. so I can read, write and be lazy on the couch.
After that I’d say he loves all the other toys equally. There are at least 30 of them (I should count) in their 2 toy baskets but these are the ones that he keeps going back for. I don’t take my own advice about keeping only a few toys out to avoid the dog getting bored with them. . . probably because I never see any sign of Will getting bored!
Meanwhile, back at the farm: Here’s a shot of the lambs grazing up in the high pasture. They are doing incredibly well and are a joy to watch. Also with them are Martha 2.0 (in front on right, black legs and face) and Barbie, both of who are thin and are getting a bit of corn and oats along with the lambs. By the way, you can see Will in the background. The flock had been loosely dispersed, grazing away until I asked Will to walk up. You can see he just got to the edge of the ‘flight distance’. . . the sheep on his side have turned their heads and started to flock up.
I hope you enjoy the weekend, and that you get some time off. I have just been reminded of how precious life is, having attended a service for a friend and colleague who died suddenly and tragically in a bicycle accident. What a reminder that this is it… this day, this hour, this moment. I’m going to turn off the computer (except to play with photos from Africa), go outside and harvest thyme and oregano and mint, make another 2 loaves of carrot bread, make another batch of Zucchini Yum and garden garden garden. I’ll intersperse that with walking with the dogs, working Will on sheep, rubbing Lassie’s belly and watching the WWSDA Herding Dog Trial outside of Portage, WI. I hope you can do something that feeds you in all ways too.
Life. What a gift.
sweet K9 mom says
I always like finding new toys for my dogs and then watching them enjoy them! May have to get the ‘Twister’ next..
Not sure if you’ve seen the “Extreme Sheepherding” with the LED Lights on the sheep. A friend sent it to me again from YouTube. If you haven’t, Enjoy!
Jim Henley says
These are great toys. I need them all!
My dogs’ favorite is the large Orbee-Tuff-Ball-on-a-String, known around here as “Rope-Ball.” (As in, “Bring Rope-Ball!”) They also love a blue stuffed squeaky toy called “Kosher Bone,” each edition of which lasts as long as 45-minutes before being ripped open. After that, it’s good old Frisbee.
Joy says
Our Toby’s (Aussie-mix) absolute favorite toy is his Tricky Treat Bal (aka Orange Ball) – he gets some of his kibble in it every night and will start dropping it on our feet if he thinks it’s past time for it to be filled.
Barb says
My Rudy (PWD) is crazy for the Orbee yellow tennis ball! I’ve taught him water work, heeling and other obedience pieces, and agility with that ball. Everything else fades as a reinforcer when the tennis ball appears. And indeed it is his favorite thing to fetch just for fun.
My Trio (girl PWD) is not toy motivated. She will take anything her brother has and immediately drop it, but to play with me and a toy is just not high on her list of enjoyable experiences. It has been an up-hill struggle to find anything at all that she will play with and then play with when I’m playing with her.
We finally settled on the Chuck-it Squirrel for running games, and she is now quite comfortable with that arrangement. And I found some Crunch-N-Tug toys at Dog Dreams that she has taken to. At age 2.5, she will now tug quite well with me on the Crunch-N-Tugs. She likes them best when the crunchy part is out of the toy and will take the bottle out before she brings it to me to play. Recently I found Skinneez, and she is in love with a Skinneez duck. And she’ll bring it to me so that we can play! Yahoo!!
trillium says
My dogs favorite toy at the moment is an empty 2 liter bottle half filled with frozen water. I’d actually froze it for camping and she scooped it out of the cooler when we got home today. It’s loud but she’s having fun. I’ll take it away when the water starts leaking out. The most favorite toy though is a tennis ball and a chuckit. And of course kongs for a reliable standby. Squeeky toys make me crazy so they are not allowed.
Emily says
So sorry for the loss of your friend. Life is so precious.
I went out yesterday and got Mick (my Brittany) a Tricky Treat Ball. The dog I used to walk/babysit/help to train had one, but she never “got” it (she isn’t motivated by much of anything, except being bad, which has made training her an ongoing issue!). I poured in some of Mick’s supper and let him go at it, and he picked up on it right away. He was finding it too difficult at the end when there was only a few kibbles left, and getting really stressed about it (he tends to get himself very stressed), so I got the last ones out for him (making sure to make him “work” for the last kibbles by getting him to nose the ball, so he wouldn’t simply wait for me to do the work for him) then put it away.
He went through a long phase of destroying toys, but I found the most effective strategy was to train him out of it. Any time he started ripping or tearing a toy it would be taken away, and he was never left alone with all but the toughest rubber toys (which he wouldn’t really play with anyway, he’s all about squeaking.) He now rarely (but not never) destroys soft toys.
Splash's mom says
My guys like the Canine Genius Leo toy. I put cookies inside it and they go crazy. It didn’t look that great to me, but what do I know, I’m not a dog. They also love the yard-sale soccer balls I bring home and deflate a little. The dogs are always the goalies, and I am the kicker. They adore it when I yell “GOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAL!”
Meg says
I was going to write about my dogs’ favorite toys, but I got stymied by Zucchini Yum. Please explain!
Christine says
At present our 11-months old dog’s (Bruno du Jura, Swiss hunting dog) favorite toy is my sister’s dog (Belgian shepard, 17 month) which spends her vacation with us while my sister is abroad. The toys scattered around are no more of interest. I love sitting on the coach and watching them play joyfully.
Too sad to hear of sudden deaths of good friends, I also enjoy every moment, especially at this time of year, although here in Switzerland the leaves don’t turn so spectacularly coloured as in your “Indian Summer”, the scenery is just beautiful.
mcappy says
We luv ORBEES however I must warn that the green top may come off the top of the strawberry…and I suppose the same for all the other veggie Orbees. My excessive chewers can eventually chew KONGS apart but have never managed to chew apart an ORBEE. You can also mail the ORBEE parts back to Planet Dog to recycle or trade for an equivalent product. I wonder if we should try Canine Leos again…the two original ones we had from when they were a start-up company split and fell apart within 5 minutes.
Linda says
Shilo’s (corgi + keeshond) favorite toy is an orange treat ball. It has depressions all around the approximately 6″ diameter ball so she picks it up in her mouth and tosses it into the air. She has found out that the treats come out faster that way. She also loves an empty plastic milk jug. She kicks and chases it all over the yard.
Mary Beth says
Trish, good for you for taking some time for yourself and your dogs! Its important to remember to do that.
My 11 month old coonhound puppy is really interesting to watch play. You’d think he’d just want to run and chase things or else sleep on the couch, but he’s anything but that. I had an adirondack chair in the house waiting to be refinished. Blaze used that as a puzzle box. He took a tennis ball, rolled it down the seat, watched it bounce through the frame underneath, the used his paws and his mouth to work it out from underneath. Today, I watched him roll a ball under my driveway gate, then carefully work to draw it back. Then he dropped the ball between the 4 X 4’s at the base of the fence and worked the ball out from between the mesh, the fence post and the 4 X 4 timber. Silly dog!
Robin says
The new Mini-Skineez are great for smaller dogs. My rat terrier mix loves his ground squirrel. He’s still crazy about his full-size Skineez rabbit, too. He likes to run past me with it in his mouth and dragging behind him. Then he yanks it out of my reach just in time. He also loves his Tricky Treat ball and bungee toys.
I, too, broke him of tearing and ripping soft toys by picking them up whenever he chewed. He still tries to chew the nose off anything that has a face, but once the nose is gone, he’s fine. I was glad to read that Trish ignores her own advice about controlling the toys. I love to see my dog’s joy and contentment as he sorts through his entire toy basket and pulls out his current favorites, one at a time.
Alessandro Rosa says
I think that for my 7-month-old Beagle, Darwin, the answer is Anything New! Darwin gets a gleam in his eye and a nervous excitement the minute you give him a new toy. I wish I had made a video of the first time we gave him an ice cube to play with, as it and he skidded along the hardwood floors.
He does have some perennial favorites though. Skinneez are great because they can be shake toys or tug toys or chew toys. As he has grown-up, he has figured out how to extract the squeekers though, so I need to be careful.
He absolutely loved the Cesar Millan (sorry) Hide a Squirel game, learned very quickly at 2 1/2 months how to flip over the plastic cups to find the squirrel but also liked playing with the plastic cups too. It was a lot of fun to watch him pick one up by the edge and prance around with it in his mouth.
In that same vain the Plush Puppies Hide-a-Squirrel game is another favorite. This is three squirrels in one plush tree stump. It took Darwin no time to get the squirrels out and about a half day to destuff one of the squirrels, squekers and all, but he left the other two intact and still really enjoys it when we take it out for him to play with.
He is on again off again with the Cuz / Bad Cuz toys, and the Starmark Everlasting Treat toy held his interest for a while. There were a few months were he was a Wubba retrieving champ, but now, ehh. He never really got the hang of Kongs for some reason. He would lick really high value food out of them, but never got into chewing them and much of the time would just leave them 3/4 full. He has liked the Orka Jack better, though I am not sure why.
He really, really liked Earl the Chick Magnet rubber chicken and Tater the Gator rubber alligator toys, but their thin rubber started to tear quickly and it wasn’t long before he had big chunks out of them.
There is one toy that is obsession forming and I think borders on cruel, but, if I need to liven up the party for Darwin all I need to do is shine a laser pointer on the floor next to him, and he would forget about a bucket of KFC sitting next to him. He goes into a type of hyper-chase mode and almost borders on OCD! I stopped using it after the first few times because, like I said, it is a little cruel. It stimulates him a great deal, but there is no satisfaction realized in the end. He can’t sit and chew on a beam of light or even catch it. But the real reason I stopped is for several minutes after playing he will continue to sniff to try and find “it,” and I just don’t think that is fair. I tried to end the game by moving the light onto another toy to see if he would transfer to that toy to get some level of satisfaction at the end of the game, but that transfer doesn’t really take place.
I think another thing that Darwin truly loves is the toy that another dog has. I don’t think he is agressive with toys, it is just if another dog has a toy he wants, he goes over and takes it, then he starts a game of chase. He doesn’t growl or start fights and if the other dog is very toy aggressive he will stop, but he just assumes that every ball or stick in the park is on loan to the other dogs from him. This love of other dogs toys got him to swim as well. At first he was very trepidacious of going into the water, but when another dog was retreiving a tennis ball that he was particularly interested in, out he swam to attempt to claim the ball. While I think he still perfers land based play he will romp and swim now in the water.
Sarah says
Love the toy discussion! I am going to order the twister thing – have been thinking about it but think our newest rescue addition will love it. Until we fostered her, our other rescue just wasn’t interested in toys although he would fetch for a limited time with a squeeky air dogs ball. The few toys we bought him were pretty much untouched – once in awhile he would mouth his squeaky fleece man or the long stuffed hot dog guy, but that was about it. I use the kongs faithfully as our 1st suffers from extreme SA, but since I follow “I’ll be Home Soon”, I only give them when we leave the house and I pick them right back up, so although they LOVE them, they aren’t allowed them unless we leave (would another color be confusing because I’d love to be able to break up their day while I’m here by giving them a frozen kong type toy with goodies inside). Anyways, our newest addition LOVES toys – she shreds stuffed toys (which makes me a bit nervous with the kids toys – she has destroyed one left out by accident) so I don’t want to give her any more stuffed ones, but this twister sounds fun as she likes to shake and toss and bounce things when she can’t engage our 1st guy to play (he’s a bit more of a lump). Thanks again for all the great discussion and ideas! Her fave is a cheap soccer ball toss toy that has ropes on it – she can shake it by the ropes or fetch the ball. Her fave to do is streak by our 1st guy and then if he still doesn’t get the message she’ll go lie down on him and put the ropes right in his face until finally he’ll play tug and chase with her. She is VERY oral (will grab anything in her mouth to greet you) so toys are a must!
Alexandra says
Love the picture of Will and his favorite toys! I’ll have to try that with my guys; I’m curious now as to which toy they’d choose.
Denise says
My 4 year old Eskie is not hugely toy motivated but does enjoy soft toys small enough for him to carry easily. He carries them around for a bit, then tosses them over his head and pounces on them like a fox catching mice – very cute and fun to watch (I also wonder if he doesn’t do it for the attention as much as for the fun of it.) He’ll also nibble on fuzzy toys and loves making squeaky toys squeak but is not destructive about it. He wasn’t a natural retriever so I shaped a retrieve and now he’ll root through his toy basket and bring me his favorites to throw for him if he thinks I’ve been doing “people stuff” too long and not paying him enough attention. I also have three Kongs that I stuff and hide before leaving for work – “Find them!” may be his very favorite game – he practically asks “Aren’t you ready to leave yet?” in the morning! Only problem is finding new places to hide them. I’m running out of ideas plus he quickly learned to cheat and tries to follow me as I hide them… have to work on the stay part of the game some more!
Anne says
My 8 month old pup love, love, loves her plastic empty tennis ball tube. She bats it all around the house, making lots of noise, and sometimes carries it in her mouth. It’s about the only “toy” she has fun with still that hasn’t been totally destroyed. As a bonus, it’s all hers because none of the other dogs consider it a toy.
Blaire says
My dog, Otis- a 35 pound Australian cattle dog mixed with your guess is as good as mine, LOVES that planet dog strawberry. He can rip up pretty much any toy in an instant, but he has cared for and protected that strawberry for over a year now! (by far the longest he has ever owned any toy) Because he loved the strawberry so much, i also bought him the eggplant and the artichoke. However, he has torn the eggplant down to just about a quarter of its original size and the artichoke is missing a few chunks as well. But absolutely no damage done to the strawberry. I swear it’s almost as if he cuddles the strawberry- sometimes I’ll look over to the other end of the couch where he’ll be sleeping with it between his paws haha.
Dena Norton says
On your previous post about toys, I forgot to mention that my Springers also like empty cardboard tubes from paper towels or toilet paper. There are lots of interactive ways that we play with the dogs with these, or they carry them around and chew them into wet, mushy blobs.