Jacob was my first Cinnamon Trust love. He was a black Labrador ex-guide dog with impeccable manners and a tendency to over-eat a denti-stick or two. His obesity was the reason I was asked to help take him out for walks as his owner suffered from a debilitating condition and could no longer take him.
On one of our usual walks Jacob picked up something green, slimy and strangely shaped. Worried that he would eat it or choke on it I scrambled to remove it and he immediately went into play mode and dropped it to the floor with an expectant look on his face.
I saw it was a chewed up ball and gave it a little kick much to Jacob’s delight. I had never seen him play before and there were no toys in the house for him. He then picked it up and kept it in his mouth most of the time for the rest of our walk with a happy demeanour.
In just a few minutes I had learned that he loves to play with a ball, puncture it and then carry it around when we walk. No matter how many new toys I gave to him to play with… his teeth went straight through them and the toys were no more.
So I wouldn’t actually recommend using tennis balls as toys for dogs as they can easily get swallowed and cause terrible injury or even death. The fact that they go slimy with saliva makes them almost impossible to grip if at the back of the throat. The tennis ball can also split apart in the back of the throat, blocking the dog’s airway. The tennis ball can also break down into pieces as the dog chews, which increases the risk of the dog ingesting those pieces. This is why tennis balls are not recommended.
Choosing a soft ball for your gun dog puppy to retrieve may tend to encourage lots of mouthing behaviour, sometimes resulting in the dog becoming ‘hard-mouthed’ – that is, it self-rewards by repeatedly crushing the toy in its mouth. So a more acceptable toy for games of retrieve would be a canvas ‘training dummy’ filled with sawdust. This provides a good texture, is solid enough and has enough resistance to reduce the amount of self-reward achieved by chewing.
With some cooperation from his loving owner about watching his diet, some exercise and more play, Jacob went from a death-knell 49kg to a healthy 35kg over 2 years and lived to be a ripe old age of 15.
