Dogs and their Toys

Dana has been in Tahoe with friends this weekend and sent this picture, so I can't claim credit for it but I do get a kick out of the idea....Spike will never be parted from his bone-shaped Kong  for a stick, although he will chase a  ball that makes a sound when it bounces. He has some kind of sonar which, combined with his nose, allows him to track down a ball on a grass field. There is a definite pattern to the way he zeroes in on it with sort of funnel shaped, ever smaller circles until he finds it. And he always does.

However  Ozzie ,the big black lab who preceded Spike, was a huge fan of sticks, the longer the better. We had many jokes about 'branch managers' as we walked around Spring Lake with him. He didn't always like sticks, but that is how we trained him to go into the water. When he was a puppy, he was playing with some big Irish Setters belonging to the owner of Aerlie winery in Oregon,  and ran headlong off the dock into her big pond after them. He was quite shocked when he surfaced in water, and although he made his way to shore, and got himself out, he was very reluctant to get into any water after that. We finally trained him by taking him to a lake in Tilden Park near us in Berkeley and throwing sticks into a sloping beach into shallow water. He was a very good swimmer and fetching sticks from the water became one of his favorite things. It was interesting to watch him because he never looked at the person throwing the stick or the stick itself but cast his gaze out into the middle of the lake waiting for the splash. I realized that this was his instinct as a retriever. His job was to watch for a duck falling into the water and then swim out and bring it back. I'm glad that in his case, instead of a dead duck, it was only a stick.

Springers, on the other hand, really do spring. Our first dog, Emma, was a springer. They are flushers, and her job was to run into the tall grass and flush out any birds that were hiding there. She would spring up in order to see where she was going. She had no interest in tennis balls, or retrieving . One time we found a tennis ball abandoned along a trail and tried to encourage her to chase it. She showed us very clearly how she felt about that. When we threw it, she strolled over to it and peed on it, watching us while she did so, than walked off, leaving the tennis ball right there. Even though he can't see, if Spike finds himself on uneven ground or in grass, he will spring.

On the other hand, our next dog, Lucy, also a black lab like Ozzie, was obsessed by retrieving tennis balls. We had coffee most mornings at Peet's, across the street from the Berkeley Tennis Club, and we had to watch her lest an errant tennis ball made its way over the fence and into the street. She could find tennis balls anywhere. Tim gave us a picture he took of her at a wilderness lake in the high Sierra, a tennis ball next to her amongst the wildflowers.

Dogs and their toys...one could write a book about them....
Ozzie, Emma, Lucy and Spike in extras.