The Day of Enlightenment... Squeaky Tennis Balls!!!

The tennis balls have arrived!! The tennis balls have arrived!!!! Thanks to Sue, we are introduced to the wonderful world full of squeaky tennis balls.

Ok, they arrived a few days ago now, but to dogs time is irrelevant. I could bring the plastic bag out of the truck again and pretend like we didn't just do this a few days ago... and they'd totally buy it!! Hmmm... I'll try that next time I'm looking for some way to screw with.... er, entertain them.

Sneaky George tries to steal a ball. Blatant thievery! Right in front of me!!

You can see that little sneak looking at me out of the corner of her eye...

So I bust her: "Hey! Get away from those enticing, squeaky balls of joy!" I say.

And this is her typical reaction when you tell her something she doesn't agree with - a few "woo-woo's and barking in your face. That's gratitude for ya.

Ok, so do you REALLY want them?

You sure? (enough torture??)

You can see big-head is right in there. He heard the squeaks and as predicted, was dancing and leaping around with excitement. However, he's used to squeaky toys being those plush stuffed toys, not balls. So when I scattered about 7 balls at once, all the other dogs ran from ball-to-ball, excited just because. They were new toys and they were everywhere! But Kuna had this preconceieved notion of what constitutes a squeaky toy and I had a heck of a time convincing him that the tennis balls, did in fact - squeak! For 15 minutes, he ran in circles looking for the source of the squeak. Even when I held it up to his face and squeaked it, when I threw it, he was like "no, that's just a tennis ball... helloooo...where's the squeaky toy??"

Here he is wandering away from the balls looking for the squeak. Eventually, he caught on and once he did... all tennis balls were Kuna's property.

Except he knows better than to mess with this little firecracker and anything she is in posession of.


Lucy is a little more wary of him as her past experience with his stealing has her a bit nervous as he wanders by... eyeing up her tennis ball...


Everybody's happy!


Jack approves.


Then I unleashed the maniac. Ripper and the balls. Ripper and the rest of this group could NOT be trusted with the balls for more than 2 seconds. They were intent on destroying them as soon as possible. And eating them was a given.


So I had to carefully dole them out. Which meant us playing our usual game of fetch. Except Ripper (who normally has the LOUDEST bark!), was 100x louder than normal due to his excitement about the squeak.

If I'm not mistaken, I think you can actually hear his bark in this photo.



So we threw and fetched a few times, with me having to tackle them a few times when they refused to give up the ball. So all was going good and I here I was going "want the ball Ripper? Eh? Eh? How much would you like this squeaky ball" as I'm taking pictures and Ripper, Ivy and Sage are bouncing around in anticipation of the throw...

None of us noticed the fuzzy figure (well, she wasn't fuzzy in real life) heading towards us - that's Kate, the matriarch of the clan, nonchalantly walking right up to my hand as if not to notice all the insanity the ball was causing. She simply heard the squeak and went to investigate. She came, she saw and...

she yoinked the ball right out of my hand.

And then she wandered off with the ball squeaking away in her mouth, leaving me peeing myself laughing. The rest of the dogs stared at her, bewildered as she ambled off, as if to say "Hey... she ruined the game. No fair!!"


Luckily there were 23 other balls to drive them nuts with!!