Tennis Balls: Contestant Number Four

This tennis ball contestant is the Tennis Ball Value Pack, purchasable at Wal Mart.  I often cruise the dog stuff aisles at Wal Mart, looking for training treats and looking at collars and checking out the toys.  They do sell Chuck It! products there, but they always seem so expensive.

I've gotten Elka other toys with this type of generic "Wal Mart dog stuff" label, such as a rubber horse shoe and rubber fire hydrant, both of which have been reasonably sturdy.  The balls themselves were the really smelly, don't really bounce well kind.  A real bonus of these dog specific tennis balls, though, and this goes for almost every one we've tried: there's less fuzz.  Elka really likes peeling the fuzz off of sport tennis balls, which I'm not a fan of.

Once I gave her the tennis balls, we had already gone for our walk this morning (and hour and a half), and played a bit in the back yard with the sport tennis balls.  I still use those for basic fetch, as she doesn't have time to settle down and chew them.  

Elka carried the first ball around for a little while, after picking it up and dropping it, and bringing it to me and dropping it in my lap, then getting it when I rolled it across the floor.  After ten minutes  or so, though, she settled into her regular ball-abusing ways, and sort of made a Pac Man out of the first one.  Not quite as good a face as with the Patriotic tennis balls  (seen here), but amusing, nonetheless.

The second tennis ball had a shorter life, as is the way of things.  Really, at this point, Elka seems to get thorough enjoyment out of a short and brutal destruction of a ball.  It doesn't bother her much when I take them away, photograph the evidence, and give them the heave-ho.