Hide and seek

My dog Joey has a ball obsession.  I’m still figuring out a lot about him, since he only joined our family in late November.  From Day 1, however, I knew it was all about the balls.

He won’t drop a ball until we have another one ready to throw for him, but he wants constant ball chasing.  He sleeps with the ball by his head when we don’t remember to take it away from him first. If we tie the ball up in a blanket, he will swipe and hump and drag and pull at it until he is able to undo the knot and get the ball out. When I get home in the afternoon, he dribbles the ball with his mouth until we are outside and carries it with him on his walk (until he drops it about halfway through, and I have to carry it the rest of the way home).

Major bonus: squeaky balls.  I recently ordered a set of 3 from Amazon, not realizing they were squeaky.  His joy was unbelievable.  It almost hurt to watch him smile so hard.  It DID hurt to tolerate the racket he loved to make.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the same sense of long term care that adult humans do and set out to destroy them whenever we stopped playing with him.  We are now down two and the third is living on top of the refrigerator until further notice, only available for short supervised rounds of catch.

His new trick? He drops the ball so that it rolls under something low to the ground.  He then stares at it a while, drops down and tries to paw it back out.  The ottoman we have by the front window is the perfect size for his short Shih Tzu legs to reach the ball wherever it ends up.  We had to move it away from the window so he could get at all sides, a minor concession.  The main problem is with the dresser because he can’t reach underneath it and will sit and whine until one of us rescues it. Then he runs around squeaking and excited until he can drop it under another table.  I think it’s hilarious but can’t understand how he can sustain his attention on a ball for so long.