Donna nibbles and grooms her soft toys

Donna is naturally curious and gets easily bored when there’s no one in the house.

Especially in the evenings, that’s when we may expect to come home from dinner to some form of destruction. She has murdered a beanie panda (travel souvenir) before, swallowed the beanie pallets and pooped beanie pallets for days. She has chewed into pieces the mini plastic sweeper and dustpan. She has chewed aluminium foil that we keep on the sofa to keep her off it. And she has eaten ginger and lemon grass teabags that are our lizard repellent All very dangerous things for her actually if you think of the splinters and possible choking risks.

We were told that toys are important to keep the dog from mischief when we had a house visit from Florence and her team.

Donna with the white bear and toy taxi from Florence.

Florence gifted us two soft toys before, one which she ripped after trying to play tug with it. We thought we would solve the problem by buying her a more durable stuffed toy that she would have difficulty ripping.

Enter the Chomper duck.

Oh sure, she played with it for a while, but with significantly less enthusiasm or interest compared to her more wimpy soft toys. = = I guess dogs just have this need to destroy?

That’s when we started asking friends for their old stuffed toys that they are looking to dispose. My friend Dot generously lugged all the unwanted toys from her office spring cleaning to our house for Donna.

The soft toys found favour with Donna, the rubber squeaky toys not so much. Donna wasn’t really interested in them but got so excited when we make them squeak that she started barking at home and we had to hastily keep it away. Maybe when we want to teach her to “speak” we’ll take them out again.

picture: Toys from Dot.
picture: Donna decided her bear needed grooming on its nose.

Meanwhile, we had stopped playing tug with Donna but we still didn’t have enough toys to ration and rotate and keep our dog from getting bored with her toys!

So for a while I was in the market for second-hand soft toys going for cheap in the online classifieds. We didn’t mind paying for quality toys for the dog but not for soft toys that we know would eventually be ripped apart. I did struck gold when there was an ad selling $1 soft toys. Turns out, the nice old lady was selling her collection of toys she had amassed for the SPCA jumble sale, which was cancelled. So lucky Donna added two new puppies, a bear and a rabbit in her collection waiting for her to hug, cuddle, nibble and eventually disfigure and dismember to her heart’s content.