Things a young dog plays with
About a year ago, I wrote about the things Hetty, our puppy, played with. Now she’s a young dog, she plays with some different things – and some the same. We used to give her bits of cardboard and plastic bottles to play with, but those aren’t good for a young dog as she destroys with them far too fast.
There are a few types of toys for dogs:
- Balls
- Rope/ tug toys
- Cuddly toys
- Chew toys
- Treat dispensing/ puzzle toys
Hetty only likes to types of toys – balls and cuddly toys.
Hetty has lots of balls – mainly strong rubbers ones she can fit in her mouth, but also a big ‘football’ with a handle that she can carry around. She loves to run after balls, catch balls, chew balls etc. My husband plays with the balls with her every morning before work and she almost bursts with excitement as soon as he picks them up. Apparently some dogs don’t like balls. I think if we’d have had a dog that didn’t like balls, my husband would have taken the dog back and demanded a refund!
We got her a couple of rope toys when she was little. They were a good distraction when she was biting us or the furniture, but she would never pick them up and choose to play with them herself. They soon stopped working as a distraction too!
The only chew toys she’s ever liked are a couple of pieces of dog safe wood. Strictly speaking, dogs shouldn’t chew actual sticks, although I’m pretty sure that most of them do. Hetty always drops a stick pretty quickly, so I don’t worry when she picks them up. Her own pieces of wood splinter much more gradually and safely than anything she would pick up in the park. They cost about £11 and last for ages, so they seem like a good investment. You can actually buy real antlers for dogs to chew on, but as a vegetarian, that doesn’t sit well with me. (I also won’t buy her things like pigs’ ears to chew on.)
We haven’t yet introduced the treat dispensing or puzzle toys. It’s something we would like to give her as a distraction for when she’s being destructive, but ironically I think we need to wait until she’s a bit older and calmer. I don’t want her destroying the puzzle toys!
Hetty absolutely loves cuddly toys and can often be found with one in her mouth. She carries them round the house and rolls around the floor with them. It always surprised me how she didn’t destroy them, even though she was quite rough with them. But that changed, as she’s destroyed five of them since Christmas. There are also a couple which she’s started to destroy which I’ve taken off her for a while to try to break the cycle of destruction! I won’t be buying her any more cuddly toys for a while.
You can get ‘tough toys’ which are made to be more indestructible, but inevitably the tough cuddly toys aren’t very cuddly or flexible – not so pleasant for her to carry in her mouth. So I’m hoping she doesn’t have to move to only having those.
What sort of toys do your dogs play with? Does their taste in toys change as they get older? (One dog we know very well has no interest in toys whatsoever, which really surprised me.)
hehehe! It sounds like Hetty really loves playing with the balls and cuddly toys. It is interesting how some dogs prefer some toys to others. When I had dogs as a child or teenager they always loved balls and sticks. x
It is interesting. Before I had a dog I hadn’t realised there was quite so many toys for them and I certainly wouldn’t have realised they would all like different toys. I find it amazing that some dogs don’t like balls! x
Oh cute. Ours don’t really play with toys. The breeder sent them home with soft pheasant toys. Destroyed immediately. Dog beds (even those meant to be indestructable) were chewed to pieces. The labrador does like a tennis ball but isn’t great at the whole fetch (not good for a dog that was meant to be a gundog). She just gets bored. She’d rather just sniff around. She likes running around N when he’s got a football, but doesn’t play with that thankfully. The German Shepherd likes to chew through tennis balls, so doesn’t get given them. They just roll around with each other, wonder round sniffing and knocking apples around. Occasionally might play with the carpet (bed!) in the run/kennel moving it around. But they don’t really play with things. The lab used to like stealing anything plastic left in the garden thought – she’d nicked buckets, watering can, bottles. Anything. Nightmare!
It’s interesting how all dogs are different. I can just picture your lab running around with a bucket in her mouth. She must have looked very funny!
I never even realised that dogs had toys before we got Hetty, but we bought her a couple when we got her and she’s always seemed to like them. She does still destroy things from time to time, so we have a couple of cuddly toys currently hidden away from her. She’s not great at bringing a ball back, but will always chase them and catch them. Then she either sits chewing it or runs around with it in her mouth.