fjm

Neither of my dogs are hugely toy motivated - they enjoy the occasional game of tug, and Poppy can occasionally be persuaded into a game of fetch, but most of the enthusiasm is on my side. Sophy simply could not see the point of Fetch, and it was not sufficiently important for me to train it through shaping, etc.

I am trying to get Poppy hyped up about a toy to help with agility training, and chose a soft toy I could slip a treat into (a giraffe in a strawberry shaped car, from IKEA, would you believe!).

The first few times of tossing it a few feet away had both dogs coming back to me looking for the treat. Then they cottoned on, and got more enthusiastic about getting to the toy, chasing ahead of it all the way down the hall. But Poppy worked out that the treat had often dropped out as it hit the floor, and stayed to investigate, while Sophy grabbed the giraffe, and brought it back to her bed on the rug where I was waiting, so that she could disembowel it at her leisure. So Poppy tends to get the treat from the toy, and Sophy gets one for bringing it back! And everybody is happy!

__________________

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring- it was peace.

~ Milan Kundera

JE-UK

Teamwork! Gotta love it .

fjm

Yes - and best of all I don't have to keep getting up to fetch the toy myself!

__________________

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring- it was peace.

~ Milan Kundera

JE-UK

Have you tried them on rope toys? Not the knotted ones, but the longish rope toys with a ball on the end? Vasco has one that has about two feet of climbing rope with a cone-shaped rubber toy on the end, and it's his favourite fetch toy ever. Something about the difficulty of managing all that rope tangling his legs really captivates him. Sometimes it literally trips him up, and he then has to kill it extra extra dead.

fjm

We have one of the shorter ones, but I haven't seen the ones with a long rope - don't tempt me! I think perhaps I should put most of the toys away, and ration the remainder, to increase their value - I find new ones very hard to resist, and we have A LOT! And Sophy still prefers to nick my knickers...

__________________

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring- it was peace.

~ Milan Kundera