My two wonderful dogs are Leesi and Piper. Leesi is a feist/border collie mix. Piper is a mountain cur/beagle mix. Leesi is the older of the two, and she has seen the passing of many friends, but she is still energetic and loves to play.
Piper is the younger of the two at about six years old. She is very energetic and also loves to play but only on occasion. She mostly likes to wander around the fenced-in yard and see what doggy treasures she can find.
I have a wide selection of dog toys for them to play and have fun with. They have many appropriately sized footballs (they squeak) and kongs. They each have a frisbee to chase. And they have two, what I call, super-thick candy bars to chew on.
Leesi is one that I got most all of these toys for long before Piper came to be part of our family. When Leesi first came to live with us as a puppy, her toy was a kong, and she had to have it with her. The kong was to Leesi what the blanket was to Linus of Peanuts’ fame. Her toy collection has grown a lot since then, and she is rather greedy with her toys though she does allow Piper to play with them too. Sometimes.
Piper isn’t much of a dog for toys though. She goes wild running and playing with a football or a frisbee, but her attention to them is short-lived. She would rather investigate places in the yard, and when she becomes hyper-focused on one spot in the yard, you can be sure there is mole or salamander theere she is after. Oh, and did I mention that she hunts bees? She hunts them with a vengeance. So much so that it really used to worry me. Because she doesn’t just hunt them down, she eats them.
Then there are the turtles. I feel sorry for the ones that she finds, the ones that somehow manage to get inside the fenced yard. Maybe they shrink to wiggle through the fence? Anyway, she paws at the turtle of the moment until I can get to this turtle and rescue it. Yes, not only do I rescue these turtles, I relocate them promptly. I carry them through my dining room and living room then out the front door to set them down in the front yard where there is only an older orange tabby that will ignore them. And from there, they can go wherever they wish. If it’s back into my back yard, they will be relocated again.
One day when I was surfing the internet, I saw an ad for a herding ball. This, to me, sounded like just the toy that Leesi needed. And since I have two dogs, I got two of them. Okay, I didn’t get the one I saw advertised, I got different ones that were made out of super hard plastic, but they were still indestructible herding balls.
Leesi, of course, went mad over the herding ball. She played so hard with it the afternoon I got them that she was limping when playtime was done. By the way, I still let her play with it even with the limp. I just restricted each playtime to twenty minutes, and the limp was gone within a week.
Back to the herding ball. Every time we would go outside, Leesi would want to play with the herding ball. She can’t bite on it because it is too large for her mouth. All she can do with it is push it all over the yard, and that she does. She barks at it incessantly, wanting it to listen to her. I’m not sure what she is trying to get the ball to do, but she is very insistent on it. So the herding ball is a hit with Leesi.
Piper? Not so much. She doesn’t want anything to do with it. So now we are the proud owners of two herding balls and only one of my dogs wants to play with them.
I needed to find a toy that Piper would love as much as Leesi loves the herding ball. I finally settled on a Pukaco interactive ball for dogsl. In my mind, Piper would love this ball because it was self-moving and would fit in her mouth. And it was suitable for indoor or outdoor play. Piper loved to catch moles, lizards, and bees, so she should really love a self-moving ball, right? Wrong. She showed no interest in it. So that was a failure on my part.
But, again, Leesi fell in love with it. She now chooses the interactive ball instead of the herding ball most days to play with. Leesi was bred as a squirrel dog, so maybe the ball moving in her mouth (which is really funny to watch because her jowls shake) simulates in her mind the way a squirrel would wriggle around. But now she carries this self-moving ball around with her most all the time. It does go to sleep and not move after so long, but even when it isn’t moving, she still has it with her.
Leesi took the interactive blue ball out with her to bark at the Amazon delivery guy, and she brought it right back inside. Like I sad, she always has the ball. So in getting them each a self-moving ball, I only succeeded in replacing the herding ball as Leesi’s favorite toy.
It’s been a few weeks now since I’ve got the interactive balls for dogs, and Leesi has selected a kong to play with just a few times, so maybe the older toys will still get some attention. And I’m sure the herding balls will get attention when the grandkids are here.
But I still need to find a toy that Piper is absolutely crazy about. Anybody have any suggestions? Or I could just be thrilled that she is content to wander around the out back yard and see what she can find.
