What do you think? I love the title ‘What Happens When Engineers Own Dogs’. Is the human’s absence detracting from the dog’s experience?
Full disclosure: I giggled. I love the gentle way the dog feeds the ball into the catapult.
Good way to exercise your dog when you’re not home?
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I thought it was kind of cute, certainly creative, and the dog does seem to enjoy it. But I think my crew would get bored without a person to interact with and cheer about good catches and go “awwwwww” for near misses.
Hi Kathi, thanks for the comment. I feel the same way. Although there’s no evidence from the little dachshund in the vid, there’s something a little bit sad about it. No one there to say “good dog”, I guess.
It’s put me on a whole train of thought about the relative importance to our dogs of us in terms of our cuddles, speech etc, and our functions – feeding, throwing balls, walks and so on. Might be a future post in it!
Love your blog – I think rotties need all the positive press they can get. A misunderstood lot, and gorgeous dogs.
My first thought is, how long will the dog be entertained by this? I noticed it keeps a count, I wonder how many the dog will do in a day.
This would never work for my lab. Sometimes, he’ll only bring back the ball if he feels like it. : )
Chris
That’s true – or in Tess’s case, she’ll only chase it if it’s someone else’s ball in the first place!
But we all know those dogs who are genuinely ball-mad. It would be fascinating to see how long they would keep it up. (Or would that be cruel? I genuinely can’t tell on this one!)
~R
Cute, but I think also sad for the reasons already mentioned. They need their human to cheer them on and just interact with them. I think Niles would keep going for quite awhile, but I know he would miss me there saying how good he was and having a quick cuddle in between throwing the ball. As you say Ro, good topic for another day.