Maisey favorite toy -- hands down -- is her rubber chicken. In less than a year, we've gone through three of these things, the most recent making an appearance Wednesday night.
She got her first one last March or April. I was trying to teach her to play fetch, and she had (and still has) this irritating habit of wanting to play "fetch/keep away" -- meaning she would fetch the toy and then play keep away so that I couldn't grab it out of her mouth. All of her toys at the time were small balls, which were almost impossible to get out of her mouth.
Enter Chicken; long enough that I could grab an end of it and play tug-of-war with her until she decided to release it and I could throw it again.
Chicken was her first squeaky toy, and she didn't know what to do with it at first. There was a lot of poking it with her nose and backing up and barking at it.
And, of course, there was the dancing around and daring it to attack her.
But within minutes, Chicken had gained the hallowed halls of toy stardom. Maisey soon preferred playing with Chicken above any other toy, and I learned a very important rule of dog ownerdom (that I nevertheless manage to forget every I'm at the pet store buying toys): squeak the damn thing before you buy it!
Chicken's squeak isn't as noisy as one of her other toys, but when you hear it squeak over and over for a couple hours at a time? That's when you want to kill yourself and regret giving anything to your dog that makes a sound.
No. 1 Chicken bit the dust sometime late last summer, to be replaced by No. 2 Chicken. Now, No. 2 had held on for a long time. By last weekend, it had lost its feet, its head was hanging on by a thread, its squeaker was long gone, and there was a significant tear in the body, but it was still holding strong. I had a feeling though, that its days were numbered, and sure enough, Maisey decided that Friday night was time for Chicken to die. For the first time, she actively sat down to destroy a chicken while I was making dinner, and pretty soon there was rubber carnage all over the dining room.
My mom was nice enough to buy a replacement, so No. 3 was put into action with No. 2 sailing off for the decommissioning ceremony.
Maisey had a fit as soon as she saw the package, and could barely contain herself long enough for me to take a picture. As you can see, the no-standing-up-against-the-table rule is being flagrantly disregarded here.
It turns out that No. 3 is a champ! It kept Maisey busy for three hours Wednesday night. And thankfully, the squeaker somehow got disabled during that time period, so now I don't have to be tortured by it.
Comments