Teddy hates toys, loves trash

As part of our training, we’re encouraged, strongly, to get our dogs to play tug with us. I know teddys_bottlethat a few years ago there was some nonsense about playing tug with your dog being a bad thing, but it’s not. Playing tug is terrific on many levels – it’s good exercise for the dog, it encourages interaction with you, you’re the source of the fun, and your dog learns to listen to you even when he’s all excited in the middle of a game.

That’s the theory, anyway. And I’ve wrestled with it with Teddy since the day I got him. Teddy has no interest, whatsoever, in toys. Never has picked up a dog toy of his own volition. Never.

I’ve dealt with this before – Dax, my first French Bulldog, wasn’t a fan of toys when we started training in agility. She certainly wouldn’t play tug, and if she did, it was never in public. But she was very, very, highly, incredibly food-motivated and she loved vegetables. So I started tugging with her with a limp celery stalk. It was messy, we went through a lot of celery, but it worked. Eventually Dax was a tugging machine and loved to play tug with anything, anywhere.

Teddy, not so much. Couldn’t care less about celery. It’s been a struggle. The compromise I’ve found is to stick a tiny bit of cheese in the toe of a sock. He’ll destroy the sock to get to the cheese, so we call it play.

The only thing I’ve ever found that he absolutely adores, and actually considers a toy is the empty bottles from my contact lens solutions. There’s something about the texture of those particular bottles that floats his boat. They’re practically impossible to tug with, he destroys them after five minutes, and if I do throw them, Teddy will chase the bottle. He just won’t bring it back.

Dog training is constantly a matter of improvising, adapting, and re-jiggering what works. Teddy is a puzzler I’ll keep working on.

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