Pound Shop Dog Toys

Daisy and Cybi are pretty hard on their toys, especially being as close together in age as they are (only 3 months separates them), and they play together a lot. It's usually noisy, generally boisterous, and often involves a tuggy toy. They love playing tug of war, whether what they are using is appropriate or not.

In an attempt to keep them from finishing off socks, shoes, paperwork, or anything else they can get hold of that looks fun, I try to have toys that they can play with permanently within grabbing range, either in their toybox or (more usually) strewn around the floor. We recently purchased a few from a local pound shop, to see how they stood up to the collie onslaught.

We got them four to go at initially.

	Early reviews were that the beige one was the clear favourite for playtime, presumably because they can both grab an end each, and the orange one had to be removed from consideration almost immediately after it was offered to them, due to concerns about major injury to one of the tug of war combatants

(Yes that is one of my dogs wearing the toy while playing tuggy. Plainly even border collies have their less than stellar moments.)










So the beige toy has taken the brunt of the beating over the month that we've had them in the house, and I have to say, I'm pretty impressed. Given that this toy was, quite literally, a pound it's given them hours of enjoyment. I think it's coming up to the end of its life now (while I always supervise play with tuggies, I am particularly careful once they begin to "shed" swallowable pieces of fibre) but it's been worth every penny. Ditto the grey rope and the yellow and pink monstrosity, both of which Cybi loves to "kill" (I'd guess the single knot in the end makes it nice and weighty to throw around). The orange one had lots of potential, while it had both a plastic handle and an attached ball, but the risk of accidental strangulation of dog was too great to my mind, and so it's now adorning the end of my staircase instead.
Here's an overview of a month of the life of a tuggy toy in the mad collie household, taken at approx weekly intervals. We're hard on our toys!