The differences in dogs’ personalities fascinates me. Why do two dogs of the same breed like to do completely different things? Jamie (the heroine of “My Doggie Says… Messages from Jamie. How a dog named Jamie ‘talks’ to her people) was absolutely not a ball dog. In fact, she was so not a ball dog that I wrote about it. Here’s an excerpt from My Doggie Says…
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“I did love my treasured ball, but, generally speaking, I’m not a ball dog.†|
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“Some dogs are “ball dogs†and some aren’t. Jamie isn’t, which makes her love for her “real ball†even more remarkable. If you throw a ball to a ball dog, the dog sees the ball as it leaves your hand, leaps toward the ball, and tries to catch it in her or his mouth. If a ball dog sees a ball in the grass or on the street, it snatches it, as if to say, “Finders, keepers!†|
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Not Jamie. She could care less about balls. She’d rather retrieve a rock or a pine cone or a stick. Throw her a ball, and she will stand there and let it hit her on the head. One of our jogging paths borders a tennis club, so we often come across an errant tennis ball. Usually Jamie runs right on by, without even a sniff. Sometimes, she steals a passing whiff, which I assume means that the ball already has an odor from some other doggie. Maybe she assumes that all balls belong to another dog. But Jamie’s just not a ball dog. And if we try to get her interested in a ball, the message is a resounding “No thanks!†She turns away and refuses to hold it in her mouth.” |
But Jamie’s red and pink floppy disk (frisbee) was a completely different story. Here she is enjoying retrieving it at Lake Arrowhead. This was her most favorite thing to do.
Callie (a seven-month-old Golden Retriever), however, is a different story. Callie is definitely a ball dog. You knew this from my stories about her playing soccer. But in case she needed to prove it, she did it this morning on our walk. Callie found an old tennis ball in the gutter, and she pushed/shoved/retrieved/kicked/carried it for about a mile. At first, she sniffed it a little, but she decided it was OK, and then she picked it up in her mouth and started her game. At one point, when the ball was lying in the gutter, she lowered her nose and gave the ball a nose-kick about 15 feet down the street.
Here’s Callie with a tennis ball:
So how do you find out if your dog is a ball dog? It’s pretty simple. Either toss or roll a tennis ball to your dog and see what happens. Jamie’s response was to completely ignore the ball — not even grace it with a sniff. But Callie will sniff it and then play with it — sometimes making up her own game.
Why should you care? It’s important to find some things that your dog really likes to do — some hobbies — and support them.
