The Best Dog Toys, According to Our Pups
Giving your dog a new toy is an exercise in natural selection. No matter how cute or pricey it is, there’s some chance that your pup will ignore the new plaything or rapidly tear it to shreds, either way leaving it for dead. Here we present the survivors: the toys that our pups have verified to be good for hours, or even years, of play that’s engaging, ferocious, and cute.
Since dogs have their own preferences—and enjoy variety—take this list as a starting point. If you’re preparing for a new dog or assembling a gift, we suggest presenting the canines in your life with a few to put to the test for themselves.
Bone (pit bull, 40 pounds, 6 years) loves to retrieve and chew tennis balls, but tears into them within minutes. The Chuckit Ultra Ball in medium is the same size as a standard tennis ball but made entirely of rubber. It’s much more difficult to chew through, so she’s able to chomp on it for a while (with supervision); the balls have lasted for up to a year. Plus, the Ultra Ball is bouncier on turf than most tennis balls, which makes for more stimulating games of fetch. The bright orange hue makes it easy to spot—even in tall grass. And the Ultra Ball floats in water, so she can fetch it from a lake, too.
Some days Sutton (Chihuahua mix, 8 pounds, 1 year) has so much puppy energy left over from dog-park play that she just runs around the apartment, digs out all of her toys from the toy bin, and squeaks anything she can find for hours on end. I may be the worst pet parent ever, but all that squeaking can get annoying. So I was happy to discover Hear Doggy ultrasonic squeaker toys, because they use squeakers tuned to an ultrasonic frequency between 24 and 28 KHz that’s silent to people but still makes a fun noise for dogs. To people it sounds like the squeaker died and there’s just a little trapped air being pushed out, but apparently to a dog it still sounds like their favorite toy. Sutton gets just as excited when squeaking this thing as she does her traditional squeakers—fun times for her and a lifesaver for my ears.
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