Buoys, Buoys, Buoys

Our Ripley loves toys, especially balls! Her special trick is carrying two balls and dribbling a third! For Ripley part of the fun is in destroying the ball, so subsequently nothing lasts very long.

I now accept that Ripley destroys toys and I am ok with that as long as she is having fun. However, I am not comfortable with a toy lasting 5 minutes and then ending up in landfill and taking 500+ years to decompose.

Ripley recently managed to damage her Boomer Ball beyond repair. It was a third-generation Boomer Ball (kindly gifted) so I have absolutely no complaints.

When on holiday in Scotland last year we came across a pile of rubbish after a beach clean. We were shocked at the volume of netting, plastic bottles and buoys that had washed ashore, and we were discussing where each piece of plastic may have drifted from...

Amongst the plastic was a couple of different types of buoys so I decided to take a couple back to our cottage to test as potential indestructible toys for Ripley.

After a thorough clean and disinfect we let Ripley loose with her new toys. One type of buoy (Google tells me it is a hard fishing trawl float) was a complete success! It is a good weight, rolls nicely, and it's too large for Ripley to get her jaws around it, so she dribbles it about the garden and loves it! The plastic is very hard and isn't yet showing any sights of becoming rough with wear. However, if this did happen I could just sand it lightly to protect her mouth and nose.

So if you are struggling to find an indestructible toy for your dog maybe take them for a stroll along the beach, pick up some rubbish and see what you can find!