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Do you play toys and insteract with your dog?

When I play ball with my dog Mocha, he always takes the ball and runs off into a corner and plays with it on his own, making me feel as if he doesn’t like playing with me very much.

After talking to other people who feed their dogs, I’ve found that it’s common for dogs to run off with the ball or not be interested in the toy ball at hand…

For a while I thought it might be a trait of some dogs to hate sharing toys with their owners. But today it dawned on me after learning with that it was the wrong way I was playing with my dog’s toys.

So what goes wrong when we play with toys with our dogs?

1. Toys in our hands

Don’t interest the dog

To get a dog interested in toys, we first need to understand why dogs play with toys?

Toys look good, toys have character, or toys make sounds. No, none of that is really the point, dogs play with toys to mimic hunting, the toy is its prey and it’s a hound.

So, the more similar the toy is to the prey, the more interested the dog will be. However, many toys, while having a prey-like appearance, do not have the prey’s instinct to run away.

If the prey doesn’t run, then the dog naturally won’t be interested in pursuing it. As a pooper scooper, if you want your dog to be interested in toys, then you need to make the toy more like a prey.

For example, let the toy suddenly appeared in the dog’s field of vision, and then suddenly disappeared; do not let the dog easily catch up with the toy in your hands …. The harder it is to catch this toy in your hand, then the more and more interested the dog will be in the toy.

2. Not letting the dog win

Dogs play with toys in much the same way as we play games, the ultimate goal is to “win”, to catch up with the toy that is the “prey” or to grab the toy that is the “prey” from you.

If it’s too easy or too hard to catch up with the prey (toy), then the dog will lose interest. After all, you don’t want to play a game where you always lose 10 in a row.

So, when playing with toys with your dog, try to let your dog win or lose.

But be careful, like tug of war, do not let the dog win too much too easy, otherwise it will make the dog think that you are a “weak chicken”, so that they are the boss, do not obey your discipline.

3. Toys thrown around

Many pooper scoopers buy toys directly after the dog threw to the dog, the dog idle nothing to play with the toy, when you have time to play with it, of course, the dog does not have much interest in it.

So, instead of giving all the toys to your dog to play with at will, you can put away some special toys and only bring them out when you are interacting with your dog, then your dog will be happy to play with you when he sees the toys that he rarely plays with.

4. Recycle toys in the wrong way

Some dogs play with you and run away when they get a toy and don’t want to play with you at all, this could be a problem with the way you retrieved the toy before. 

Don’t suddenly snatch your dog’s toys and put them away when he’s in the middle of playing. This will make your dog think that you take pleasure in snatching its toys, which will cause it to subconsciously avoid you when playing with the toys.

The correct way to recycle toys should be to exchange them with tasty treats with your dog, letting your dog know that the toy will get food if you give it to him, so that you don’t have to worry about the next time your dog runs away when he gets the toy.

So there are so many ways to play with your dog, no wonder Mocha always dislikes me. No wonder Mocha always dislikes me. Enough said, let’s use the newly learnt method to play with Mocha…