Stuffed Toys

[Bama Britt]

So, my Ginger has three stuffed toys (deprived I know) and she does this weird (IMO) thing with them that I wanted some idea why. It may just be her thing??? Anyway, she has a squirrel, rabbit, and gingerbread girl. All have squeakies. When she gets really excited, she squeaks away with them. But when she is moderately excited, she nibbles on them. She nibbles all the way around the ears, feet, tails, etc. Is this something they may do in the wild to de-fur their kill?

I know it's a weird question, but my only other experience with a Brittany that had stuffed toys proceeded to de-stuff all of them.

Thanks for everyone's input...it just makes me curious.

[mkilcz]

Sorry, but I don't think I'll ever understand Brittany behavior! At my house, Rocket can destroy a stuffed toy in seconds, and can't even have his own anymore. When my daughter was little, he would sneak away and chew the noses off of her Care Bears (oh the horror!) Jack, on the other hand, is gentle with stuffed toys... he'll shake them but seldom chews or destroys them. He even has a special 'baby" that he has carried around for the past three years. The interesting part is that Rocket generally respects Jack's toys and doesn't de-stuff them. He'll does use them to get Jack's attention if he wants to initiate play, but that's it. So idk, your guess is as good as mine.

[janet909]

Sorry, but I don't think I'll ever understand Brittany behavior!

So very true. Shep is very gentle and has never destroyed a toy. Wesley will get fixated on a seam and work it until the guts starts coming out. He'll then start to eat the guts without intervention. Now Moby........Moby has an octopus toy that he's had for 11 years. It has had a lot of plastic surgery and looks like an alien. He finds great comfort in this toy every evening. He "sucks" on the head (more a gumming action) while kneading the 8 legs (which he tangles up in his two front paws) for as long as an hour sometimes. He gets a dreamy look on his face and I swear that sometimes, he's asleep but the movement is still going on. It's like a trance. Unfortunately, Wesley has gotten hold of "Octopussy" a couple times and I swear it's total panic on our part because we've had trouble finding identical toys (he's on his 2nd in 11 years) hence the plastic surgery. So, there's our squeeky toy scenario................3 dogs with completely different behaviors!!!!!

[Cindy]

Kayla and Jill will destuff and tear every toy apart - multiple times if possible. Pippa has "foxy" whom she carries through the house, sleep on, and kind of mouths from time to time. And god forbid Jill or Kayla try to take Foxy away - YIKES!! She doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in keeping the stuffed toy companies in business and just may be the reason we can some day retire!

[adele]

One of Lola's nicknames is "The Eviscerator". She see's a new stuffed toy, her eyes get big, and she dances with joy. I think its a matter of pride with her to get those innards out as quickly as possible.... I can almost hear her say "time me"... One thing though, she always has the good manners to remove any plastic face parts first. Its just not right to destuff a toy with its face still on. Happily she does not eat any of it. Just spreads it around the living room. (I used to fix them but gave up, now I restuff them, leave the hole and Lola re-destuffs them. Sometimes she stands beside me with her nose about 2 inches from the restuffing activity and as soon as I say okay she begins the evisceration again).

Perhaps when Ginger is nibbling her toy she isn't playing Great-Orange-and-White-Hunter, perhaps she's playing Mommie and grooming her babies.

[Bama Britt]

Hmmmm...interesting thought that she may be grooming her babies. Wished I could just ask her.

[adele]

Wished I could just ask her.

Don't we all.

[Lisa]

Like everyone else, my 3 all react differently to stuffed toys.

Britty will play briefly with them. She likes to shake them a little, squeak them, run around with them in her mouth, and play a little tug with them. She's never "hurt" one of her stuffed toys. Britty has her very own stuffed toys that I keep put up out of reach of the other dogs. When she wants to play, she stands in front of the shelf that they are on, and I giver her a toy to play with. When she's done, she gives me the toy and carefully watches as I put it up on her shelf for safety.

Buster prefers to violently kill his toys...mostly by be-heading. He will stand on the body of a toy, grip the head in his mouth and pull until the head pops off. If the head and body are one piece, then he goes for the limbs of the toys. Buster loves to shake the toys, de-stuff them, and generally just destroy them. Once the toy has been de-stuffed, he likes to carry around the carcass as his trophy, so we have lots of de-stuffed toys in the toy box that Buster will carry around and shake, just to make sure they are dead.

Charm goes for squeakers. Any toy with a squeaker, she isolates the squeaker, quickly chews down to it, and removes it. If the toy has stuffing, she de-stuffs it too. She likes to play tug with the toys, and shake and kill them too. The only exception is her alligator. Gator-gator gets carried around by one leg, since the body is too thick for her to pick up. Charm carries it around, plays fetch with it, and when she's tired, she snuggles with it. If I tell her to go get Gator-gator, she will go find it and bring it to me.