Dog Toys – the Four Types and How to Use Them
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Walking down the toy aisle of your local pet supply store can be overwhelming. There are hundreds of toys to choose from. Most people just get whatever looks interesting, or at least what their dog picks up and slobbers on! Today, I’m going to show you the four types of toys you should have, and how best to use ’em. So, in all things, there’s a strategy if you dig a little deeper. Dog toys are no different. You can use your toys to develop your relationship, to teach important skills and behaviors, and generally make life a lot more fun. To start, understand that dog toys break down into four main categories. They are:
- Chew toys
- Dental toys
- Interactive toys
- And Plush toys
The nature of these toys is fairly self-explanatory. Info on how to use these in the smartest ways, however, is not so easily come by. Worry not, friends! You’re in good hands! Let’s go over these one at a time.
Perhaps the most obvious and ubiquitous category is chew toys. These are designed to be chewed, mangled, punctured, gnawed on, and beaten up regularly. Consequently, they’re generally made of tough rubber or silicone, or even antler, and come in tons of shapes and sizes.
Dental Toys are also a pretty obvious category. An augmented chew toy of sorts, dental toys are designed to scour teeth, massage gums, and promote blood flow. These can be supplemented with doggie toothpaste if necessary, although most of them are designed to work alone. These have ridges, knobs, fins, and scales on them to work on the dog’s mouth while he or she chews. Some Dental toys are fully consumable.
With Interactive Toys, we’re now getting into much broader territory. Interactive toys include tug toys, balls, frisbees, retrieval dummies, and variations. Interactive toys also include puzzles and games. As the name says, these are things that your dog interacts with on a higher level than just lying down and chewing. Interactive toys are great because not only do they provide mental stimulation — which is just as important as physical stimulation — but they also offer endless training opportunities. Every moment with one can be a teachable moment. That’s huge, guys. Don’t waste it.
Finally we get to Plush Toys. These are primarily stuffed animals and stuffed shapes, although it also includes the stuffingless flatties. Generally, these kinds of toys look like little animals or cute little characters. Like the others, they come in an endless array of shapes and sizes for all kinds of dogs. Ok. Great.
Now we know the classifications…but so what the heck do we do with them? Well, what ends up happening in most households is that owners buy a whole bunch of toys from all four categories, and then just go, “Here ya go, Rover!” All of the toys are available all of the time with little to no guidance or supervision. What a waste of opportunity! C’mon, we can do a lot better than that! Here’s how it works with the categories:
CHEW TOYS
Chew toys are available all the time. You should have chew-toy trained your dog right from the beginning, either as a puppy, or as a newly adopted dog. If you have not spent some time chew-toy training, start now. Chewing releases endorphins that calm your dog down and produce feelings of contentment. A chew-toy-trained dog is comfortable being alone and tends to stay out of trouble when unsupervised. Puppies and/or new dogs should initially be fed exclusively via hand-feeding or in chew toys like a Kong or a Squirrel Dude. Forget all the fancy recipes you find online, and for sure don’t buy any of that cheese-whiz-looking crap made to fill chew toys. Instead, use their normal food:
- Measure it out,
- moisten it,
- and freeze it.
Now it’s on-demand and convenient. Leave them with food when you leave the house. Use food-filled chew toys when you must attend to other things. Tie food-filled chew toys to the insides of crates to facilitate crate training. Tie them to trees in the yard during summertime for outside fun.
Since you’re using their normal food, you’re keeping their nutrition balanced. You’re not glutting them with treats, which should ideally only be about 10% of their daily caloric intake. You’re also empowering their food to be a training reward by itself. You can use dog food to train your dog and save the treats for jackpots.
Ultimately, a food-filled chew toy will: Crate train a dog ultra fast. This makes potty training and overall management a breeze. It also trains the dog to enjoy time alone, circumventing the destructive behaviors associated with boredom or isolation distress, commonly mistaken for separation anxiety. Even true separation anxiety can be mitigated to some extent with strategic chew toy training.
Regular chew toys also make great coping methods for high stress or arousal. Train your dog to funnel excitement and energy into a chew toy. Whenever a bunch of my friends come over for bad horror movie night, my Boston Terrier says hello to each person and then promptly finds a Nylabone to attack because I’ve trained him to funnel his over-the-top energy there! What an awesome outlet! Not only does it calm him down super fast, but it circumvents other problems like excited collisions with my other dogs that, in the past, have resulted in scuffles. BOOM. Problem was solved with some training and chew toys.
DENTAL TOYS
Dental toys can be left out, too, for the most part. The exception would be if you plan to use toothpaste with it, in which case they’re brought out at regular intervals to temporarily replace a regular chew toy. These should be supervised when toothpaste is involved and, of course, cleaned afterward.
Also, dental toys should be checked after each use. If any of the massaging studs or fins start to come off, the toy should be retired. All chew toys, for that matter, should be regularly inspected and retired when they get too small or too mangled.
INTERACTIVE TOYS
Interactive toys are only brought out when you initiate a play session. You keep them put away and decide what game to play and when. Your dog may have favorites and that’s great, but he shouldn’t have free access to the interactive toys. By controlling access, you can leverage the toy and the activity as training rewards. Training doesn’t always have to be done with treats! In fact, toys are a gateway to phasing out treats altogether.
You then also use the games and activities to teach behaviors to your dog. For example, tug is an awesome game.
Look: if a well-meaning neighbor or a pet-store trainer tells you never to play tug with your dog, please thank them and walk away; that is complete rubbish.
As with all games with your dog, tug is a great opportunity for learning and bonding. You just have to start out by teaching the rules. Playing tug with a puppy is one of those activities that helps to develop a soft mouth. it goes along with the bite inhibition training that we do in the off-leash puppy classes.
And every dog should know Take It and Drop It, two important and very basic commands. Incidentally, interactive toys are a great way to do that. Tug toys without squeakers are the best. Most dogs really go bonkers with squeakers, but a squeaker can trigger higher levels of arousal and encourage them to dissect the toy to get it, which is a bad habit. We don’t need our dogs to find that activity fun and start dissecting the mail and your purse, or to go after other things that squeak like the neighbor’s chihuahua, a kitten, or your guinea pig.
Furthermore, using other interactive toys like balls, frisbees and retrieval dummies give a dog exercise. The more you have them do with those toys, the more you stimulate their brains too.
PLUSH TOYS
Finally, Plush Toys are the most misunderstood and misused category. Many owners buy these for their dogs and allow them to destroy them. This is wrong. Not only are you missing out on a tremendous learning opportunity, but you’re also training your dog to tear apart other things they find, like slippers and wallets. A dog should never destroy one of these toys.
A $1.99 plush toy should ostensibly last indefinitely. Your chew toys and interactive toys should get all the wear and tear. The plush toys are for teaching. A really good play & learning session I’ve used in the past uses an interactive toy and a plush toy, and it goes like this:
- The tug toy goes first. The dog can’t have it until we say, Take it! And we play tug for a minute or so. This is a great time to teach game manners and rules, like “don’t ever accidentally get me with your teeth!”
- Now we use Drop it. Teach it, perfect it, and reinforce it.
- Now the tug toy goes away, and the plush toy comes out. Here’s where things get interesting: We squeak it, and treat it like a baby in our hands. We treat it like it’s alive! We want softness and kindness towards it.
- Any grab, bite, or tug gets a “HEY! What have you done?! You’ve hurt Mr. Toy” This a violation of the Take It rule (that is to say, the dog can’t take it in her mouth unless and until we approve it).
- It also shows you the difference between what you think the boundaries are and what your dog thinks they are. Very often, there’s a disconnect there. This is where we step up and bridge that gap.
- If they grab for it, or if their Drop It is sloppy, then we have a 5-second instructive time out in a down-stay.
- Now the plush toy goes away, and we repeat the cycle a few times. So, the interactive toy comes out again, and we use tug as a reward for being nice to the plush toy.
- Play this game between five and ten minutes. When you’re all done, say, “All done! Thank you!” and put the toys away. Remember, access is restricted to these toys to only times when games are being played with YOU.
Don’t forget to praise enthusiastically for every good thing! Reinstruct for slow responses. Repeat exercises and have high expectations. Treats are not necessary here because the rewards are intrinsic; ”they’re built into the activity. And for that to work, it’s got to be FUN. So relax, and make learning a part of your fun. It’ll pay off HUGE down the road.
IN CONCLUSION
Imagine if you had other small animals in the house: a guinea pig or a bearded dragon. Or imagine if you had a new baby or one comes to visit. Or maybe your cat has kittens. Or maybe you messed up your knee and you need Rover to take it easy around you for the next few weeks. THAT’S what these activities are for. Understanding how best to capitalize on these toys and their categories can help you develop a lot of healthy dog behaviors, and build a rock-solid bond.
So there you go, fellow dog lovers. Thank you for watching, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel, thumbs up this video, and connect with me in the comments about how you use toys in your home. Check the description for notes and resources. And until next time, keep learning, keep practicing, and I’ll see you soon. Cheers.
RESOURCES
Here are some great toys I use and recommend. The links below are affiliate links. These won’t cost you anything, but the commissions we may earn through them help offset the cost of dog treats. Thanks for your support!
WORK-to-EAT TOYS
CHEW TOYS
DENTAL TOYS
Nylabone Double Bone (the one in the video)
Kong Jump ’n’ Jack Toy (also pictured in the video)
Orka Jack w/ Rope (this was my Boston’s favorite toy when he was younger)
INTERACTIVE TOYS
Kong Wobbler (very popular interactive toy) Amazon Chewy
Kong Tug Toy (pictured in the video)
Orka Jack w/ Rope (I listed this already…but this one does double duty!)
PLUSH TOYS
Lambchop Stuffed Toy (pictured in the video)
Plush toys are extremely common. You can find a large selection in just about any pet supply store. Heck, even dollar stores or second-hand stores like Salvo or Goodwill will have a good selection for cheap also.
OTHER RELATED STUFF
Read my article on Reward Scaling and use it in conjunction with your toys!
Download my free handout on Jazz Up + Settle Down (PDF). Using a toy for this would work like gangbusters!
You could also use a toy for bark-control. Chew toy training, of course will do that, but you can also use an interactive toy for Barking training. Download the free PDF handout!
Problems at the vet or groomer? Check out our Vet & Groomer Routine (PDF). You can use a toy for this too!
Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, Simpawtico Dog Training, LLC will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, we only recommend products or services we use personally, and that we believe will add value to our readers. We are disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” Your support in purchasing through these links enables us to keep simpawtico-training.com running so we can deliver great content to you free. Thank you!
It’s great that you mentioned that you should have chew toys available for a puppy from the beginning. My wife and I are wanting to adopt a puppy next month, and we want to make sure that we have everything ready. We will have to find a local store that sells dog toys that we can get for our puppy to use once we bring it home.
I see so few people take the opportunity to actually train their dogs with their toys! It makes such a huge difference when they get into an environment without the owner or with other dogs. Enjoyed the article, thanks!