Here with how to train a dream dog all right let’s head to the store, all right so it’s a little bit later than i thought it would be by the time we got here but we are gonna be heading into the store to pick out our toys come on let’s go we’re pretty lucky to have quite a few local pet stores right near us so it doesn’t take long to get there and many of them have a lot to offer as you can see there’s tons of toys to choose from there’s plenty of food choices i’m going to check each toy to make sure that it’s going to be strong enough for our powerful chewers back home uh-oh i can’t leave the store without something for the gerbil and the kitty cat at home all right back to dog toys so we’re going to see which ones would be the strongest and most durable and can shove a ton of filler inside found one ah this one looks pretty good too we’re gonna talk more about these when we get back home i want you to pick a part pull apart tug at your toys find out which ones are the best like this one here that’s definitely going to make it home with us this one here i’m not too fond of as you can see it’s kind of rubbery that’s not a good one dogs are probably going to chew that apart pretty good this kong wobbler that’s a good one i’m going to talk about this back at home as well now kong does make a ton of durable products the red and the black the black one lasts a lot longer and is for aggressive or assertive chewers and the red one is pretty typical i want you to check the sizing on them as well so pick the right one for your dog i tend to go up in size just by one this one looks like a puzzle toy this looks pretty good we’re gonna try that one let’s see what else do they have here ah tug of jugs i love tug a jugs now you’re gonna notice that it has a rope that the dog can pull through and then also the bottom comes off and we’re gonna be able to put our treats inside at the bottom and it becomes a great puzzle toy your dog has to try to figure out how to get the kibble out Bentoballs are really good too that’s gonna make it in the cart and now we’re on the hunt for whimsies oh look our cart is filling up okay before we head home we have to pick up whimzees, nicole our other certified trainer recommends me so we’ve got to give them a try all right we’re at checkout we’re going to do the speedy checkout process here i do have to note that we did end up putting some kitty cat and gerbil toys on the counter can’t go home without the extra toys for the kids gotta get the dog food as well okay we just finished our shopping trip we are going to head home uh head inside take everything apart give it a good uh sanitizing uh clean up wipe down and start filling it up i’ll show you all of the things that i use to fill up our our busy toys and keep our pups out of trouble and chewing on things that they’re supposed to okay because i don’t think my dogs are spoiled enough and i want to make sure you guys get all the best ideas for your pups i decided i’d hop on amazon and find a few more for you a few more busy toys that i think would be great options for your pup to play with let’s hop over and start to start looking for some stuff so you can obviously type in busy toys for dogs but i’m going to make this kind of simple for you uh snuffle mats are the bomb diggity you want to make sure that you get one that isn’t going to fall apart pretty easy so we are ready put one in our cart here i’m gonna actually get this one here this is an awesome one okay another really good product that i love to get are the neenah addison puzzles these ones are really fun for your dog lots of engagement definitely will keep them busy i try to find the ones that don’t have a lot of pieces that will come off just because i don’t want my dogs to be to chew them up when i’m not around or uh pieces to get lost and then you know then then the puzzle’s no fun anymore when a piece is missing so this one here this is a pretty popular one right these are sliders the pieces are going to actually slide on the toy you can put little pieces of kibble in each of these little holes and then the pup has to push these around to to get them out right as i’m scrolling through here i happen upon this into pet dog toy ball i love it because it has these little grooves in it these little teeth that hold kibble or we could smear some peanut butter in there so i’m gonna actually add that to the cart that looks fun and back to our task of picking a puzzle here trying to find a good one oh this is awesome yes we definitely need to put some licky mats or lickety mats in our cart so these are really good because we can smear some other things on them i love to use the lickety mats when we are given baths we can put these in the tub stick them to the wall and then we keep our pups occupied when we’re giving them a bath that way they’re not drinking all the water splashing all over the place and food always makes the experience more positive all right perfect we found some lickety-mats we’ll toss those in the cart and again we’ve got to get back to finding a different puzzle i want to find one for you guys and show you which one to pick okay i think i got sidetracked again i love this one here this looks really fun uh we can put the treats inside of it and our pups can bat at it and roll it and then the treats are gonna come out so i’m gonna put that one in the cart because that looks fun all right i found it this is the one i was looking for this one we can put some little pieces of kibble or treats inside and the little flipper looking things can move and then these little pegs can move as well they look like they might slide so i am thinking this might be a great fit for us to start with it’s always best to start with a toy that is as you can see here like there’s level one level two level three there are different levels to these puzzle toys so making sure that you pick one that might be a little bit easier for your brand new pup uh would be ideal otherwise they’re gonna get really frustrated and they’re not going to want to play with the toy okay i think we have picked all the toys and we are going to go and set them up then we’ve got a bunch of things that we’ve picked up at the store and a few that we ordered online so we’re going to go through those today and just kind of give you a what can you do with these how do they work and of course we’re going to let the dogs play with them too and see what they do all right when we were at the store the other day we were looking for toys that had durability one of the things that you need to pick out or to kind of find or look at when you’re when you’re picking your toys is something that’s going to last if it’s a toy that can easily be chewed up not only is that a waste of money but it could be a danger because your puppy can ingest that so we went looking for toys that kept our puppies busy lasted a while um and maybe even had some levels of difficulty to them so when you have a brand new puppy maybe about eight weeks or so 9 10 maybe somewhere in there you’re gonna want to find toys where their difficulty level is it’s pretty simple not that hard at all as your puppy grows they’re probably going to need uh different more difficult toys something that’s really going to make them think how do i get this thing out how do i make this thing move how do i interact with this thing in the best way so we got a couple different varieties of things here and then we’re going to do with some unboxing for the toys that we purchased off amazon as well so you can kind of get a variety of things that we we purchased the good old fashioned regular old kong toy kong does come in uh two different like strengths you have the super duper for tough chewers the black kong and then the regular kong is for you know basic regular chewing uh if you find that your dog is a assertive chewer you’re probably going to want to get that the black kong it lasts it’s going to last longer both of them have pretty durable rubber pieces to them it has a hole in the middle that you can stick all sorts of things like peanut butter you can pick any fruits and vegetables not grapes because grapes are toxic for dogs but things like pears and blueberries this is just baby food you know if it’s safe for baby it’s probably safe for puppy um zucchini and peas and then we have some meats here beef and turkey and you know we could use peanut butter we could use uh yogurt we could use now when you pick a yogurt you want to make sure that it has no sugar added so no sugar added and the same kind of goes if you’re picking a peanut butter make sure again no sugar added but most importantly that it doesn’t contain xylitol this is just a peanut butter from our local grocery store but you can pick an all-natural peanut butter again no xylitol it’s very toxic for dogs all right uh a word of caution when you guys are filling up your kong i don’t want you to cram this thing so full that if your pup tries to lick things out it causes a suction effect and then it’s kind of dangerous for your dog to have their tongue stuck in there so what i tend to do is put some kibble in the bottom first that leaves some air pockets in there i put a smear of peanut butter in there right on the inside kind of smear it all over um i can put another layer of kibble in there or i can use one of like say our proteins or our veggies so i’m actually gonna do this here i’m going to put some of the zucchini in actually this is spinach zucchini and peas and i’m going to put that in there as well okay then this one is going to go in in a bag as well and what’s going to happen is once we get all of our toys filled up we’re just going to put them in the tray so that none of them fall over or tip over and make a mess everywhere so kind of keeping everything as it should be upright so let’s start off here with this uh Bentoball so the Bentobal pretty hot toy uh lots of dogs love it and it’s pretty durable as well so we’re gonna open this up because again all of these toys we are going to be giving to our dogs we’re going to see which ones they love the most the thing i love about the bennet ball is that it has it’s pretty durable rubbery toy um it has this center that you can refill with these um these treats in here so when your pup finally gets through all that you can replace this center with a new one so you can you can buy refills for this one and you could always put some kibble so i always fill mine with some kibble all right so you can put kibble in there okay you can also smear some peanut butter in there be careful though you don’t want to put too much in the crevices because then it’s really hard for your puppy to get out then this does make this a more difficult toy so if you’re giving this to a new puppy you’re probably going to want to keep it light and simple not over overthink it on adding things to it okay so what’s also gonna happen is one just came out now uh the more they play with it and roll it around and chomp on it those little pieces of kibble are gonna pop out as well all right now i love these kinds of toys i actually have a holy roller this is by jw toys a holy roller ball it’s like a big ball that looks very comparable to this with all these little holes in it what i actually love to do with these types of toys i’ll put these off to the side over here is i have some fabric pieces over here just some washcloths or fabric this is definitely a toy that you’re going to want to supervise um when you’re giving it to your dog you’re not going to want them to play with it unsupervised because we don’t want our dogs to eat the washcloths can’t tell you how many vets when i’ve worked at the vet’s office how many vets had to do surgeries to remove wash cloths so it’s not something that you want to leave them with in their crate or unsupervised so what we’re going to do is just grab a couple of your pieces of kibble and we are going to put them in there and roll it up okay let me move that out of the way we’re just going to kind of line them up in here and roll line it up and roll right and then what we’re going to end up doing is just taking and shoving this through one of the holes or maybe even two right now it becomes a puzzle toy for our puppies so this is a great puzzle toy these will take the tags off don’t want to give those to our dogs all right so i can fill this up with you know a bunch of these different little things here which really again it’s an enrichment toy it’s a busy toy you know we’re taking toys and figuring out how to fill them up with things to keep our pups busy so we can end up putting this one in here now your pup’s going to want to tug at this chew on it play with it pull it apart and that’s a lot of fun for your dog that keeps them busy longer than just giving them a plain old regular bone all right a few pieces are falling out that’s okay because that’s what we do want we want them to get a little bit as they play with it here and there which makes it exciting they’re going to want to play with it even more they’re going to try to figure out how to get these out all right now this one here is a well-loved toy it’s pretty beat up i showed you guys this one at the store um this is our kong wobbler so again similar to the um Bob A Lot toy in that it wobbles and i love it because this bottom comes off you’re going to fill or put some treats in here and then your puppy has to bat at it and roll it around and paw at it and knows it in order to get those treats to pop out so this thing like i said is pretty scratched up because they they love the heck out of this thing so this is a good toy to use this one here is a pet safe tug-of-jug i like this one as well because you can take the treats and shove them in the bottom here all right put a bunch in there now they’re going to be able to roll this thing around as well and tug on the the rope and let me take the paper off here all right now if you guys have watched my toy article my busy toy article from a previous week here’s the link right here you’re gonna know that i often clip off a lot of this fringe on the rope toys i don’t leave a lot of fringe on my rope toys because i don’t want the dogs to eat it ingest it and then there’s a blockage so making sure that we trim this off a little bit that’ll be uh that keeps our dogs safe so yep that’s right brand new toy and we’re hacking it apart but safety first for our dogs all right put that in the garbage bin all right so this one’s going to be ready to go in a bit here let’s see here some other things that we can use this is pretty cool um one of our trainers uh on staff here she actually uses the whimsies and fills them up with some peanut butter so we’re going to prepare some whimsies for our pups as well here she loves filling these up this is part of her Sunday prep when she’s getting you can see these are little alligators what else do we have here what’s in here are they all alligators oh cool looks like they might all be alligators nice all right so these are pretty simple they just make like a little tasty little tasty treat get into peanut butter putting it in there filling it up and again we’re going to put all these in the freezer so we’ll make a few up because we have three dogs you can’t give one without giving the other one something or else they’re gonna they’re gonna get upset one of the other things you can do so you don’t have a hot mess all over your freezer you can always just take some of these littler ones or even the big ones and put them in a little bag that way again they’re not making a mess all over the place they’ll be ready to go they’ll be easy to pull out so these make great filler toys simple little like a little snack okay those ones are going to be ready to go now on a side note um if you don’t really love or your dog doesn’t really love any of the filler toys any of the puzzle toys or the filler toys you can always try things like a bena bone or a nylabone or even a marrow bone one of the kind of cool tricks that i do to help my dogs i mean because once you get this thing i mean it’s brand new you know it’s kind of boring sometimes dogs will go after it if it has enough scent on it but being that it’s brand new you know and not as interesting i will actually take this and i have my dog food container over here on the side and i will put it in the dog food container overnight let it kind of have some of the get the some of the oils and the flavor on it then give it to your dog and if that doesn’t work i know this is going to sound absolutely ridiculous but it works almost every time with almost all dogs rough this thing up like take a hammer to it add some edges to it because sometimes it’s just too smooth and your dog doesn’t actually have anything to grip on to and it becomes less interesting and if you end up hammering it up or adding some little notches to it or roughing you know rough edges putting it in that dog food bag now it’ll actually have some little spots where the crumbs and the oils can uh attach and kind of get into the little nooks and crannies and crevices there so that’s my little trick to getting them to want to really eat a kind of boring toy or play with a boring toy this goes for our rope toys or um any any other toys that they’re just not loving right away put it in that dog food container and or bag and let it sit there overnight don’t forget it now just a note on treats treats really should only make up about 10 percent of your dog’s daily diet so we don’t want to overdo it and that’s why i am putting kibble in in many of these what i’ll end up doing is measuring out a meal so we we have our measuring cup you know this is about uh this is one cup here this is wesley our standard poodles daily diet he gets about a cup and a half of food and the reason i you know i’ll measure it out and i’ll leave it there because then i can either use it uh at meal time as training time or take a little portion of it and start sticking it in these busy toys that he may get throughout the day and that way we’re not overdoing it on the treats i love zuke’s training treats these are really good for most dogs most dogs love these these are what i call medium level treats so if you’re looking for more information on different treats and the value of treats during training go ahead and check this article out here and you’ll find a bunch of different treats that we recommend things like you know let’s see where is it here these ones here these are the merrick uh backcountry this is real duck sausage cuts this is uh so exciting the dogs absolutely love this this one to me is a little rich so i’m not gonna actually put like a whole one in uh one of the toys i’m gonna break it up so this is gonna get broken up and put in a couple different toys and again i might only give my dog one maybe two of these a day depending on you know what’s going on and did they do they need to stay busy with something else uh like a k n enrichment game or are we going out walking or are we doing our decompression walks um so are we in training mode you know it really just depends on what’s going on i’m gonna actually stick one of these in our alligator stick that in there all right i got one left over i’ll put it back in here so yeah some of these toys do make a mess so you’re going to want to give them to your pup in a place that’s not going to get the carpets all dirty or maybe you may like something like this may give them this in their crate i love giving our puppies the kong in their crate because once it’s gone it’s gone and then you have a really hard rubber toy that they’re not going to tear apart at least again most of them aren’t if you are looking for more ideas on what to put in your kong make sure you check out our kong filler recipes over here at this article okay let’s switch gears and do our unboxing and find out what else we have all right just like magic right let’s find out what came from amazon um hopefully all of our stuff came this is actually the first time i’m opening this we are opening this together so let’s see what we’ve got not for dogs oh okay first up let’s do this these are our lickety mats so lickety mats are super awesome because they have suction cups on the back which means we can stick them on a door on a refrigerator or most importantly in the tub when you guys are giving your puppy a bath you’re going to actually see this in one of our other articles that we’re working on we actually use this in the bathtub to keep our puppies busy and licking this instead of licking up all the water or fussing trying to get out of the tub this will help make bath time a more positive experience um because there there’s food involved who doesn’t love food and then of course they’re gonna be preoccupied trying to get all the peanut butter or whatever you smear apple sauce yogurt the plain yogurt that we talked about before with no sugar so this will be able to get stuck to wherever you would want it to go so your puppy stays focused on this i also like to use this when i’m doing nail trims as well so then again our puppy has something to stay focused on while we’re working on something else and nail trims tend to be a little bit of a scary thing so we want to make sure we make a positive association with that so this particular one came with two uh two lickety mats and oh and a brush or like a glove that you brush your your dog’s fur with not really a toy that we’re talking about today but definitely important and we’ll go along with our bathing article next week and again i’ll put the link to these in the description below this article okay next up what do we have here this is a west paw and that one is a jw so i did get that mixed up just a little bit um but two similar toys i like the west paws ones because we can actually take this small one and shove it in here i’ll show you what i mean these are also really good because if you could zoom in here just a little bit these ones have these little teeth in there these little rubber teeth that we can shove treats and other fillers with inside there and then again this can go in the freezer and get frozen up and again makes another really good busy toy hey so cool thing about these again we can we can smear some either peanut butter or any of the other items that i mentioned earlier any of them in there we can put some this is our let’s see this one is beef again it’s just baby food it’s already been ground up and put in our put in a jar for you ready to go so you don’t have to grind it up yourself okay we’re going to smear that in there so this is going to be like a beefy peanut butter mix and then i can take some kibble and shove it in there as well this is going to be super tasty for one of our lucky dogs and i’m going to take some peanut butter and put it in the other one i’ll show you how they connect here in just a moment in the comments below tell me which one of these fillers are you going to put in your dog’s toy this one again was pear and blueberry and we’re going to pretty much just kind of smash it together there we go it pops into place and then what’s going to end up happening is your pup can work on pulling it out and then also all the fun stuff is going to start coming out or spilling out again if you freeze this i would probably not put this one on top but if you don’t freeze it then you can and it’s going to make kind of like a wobble toy like we talked about before here with this this also adding this on top intensifies the level of difficulty for this toy so something to keep in mind if your puppy is frustrated by potentially the kong toy that we put in the freezer already then something like this might be a little easier all right what else do we have in here this one’s pretty fun this is actually it is just a rubber ball but it has these fun little teeth in it that are perfect for putting little pieces of kibble in so we can put our pieces of kibble in here just shove them in there and again our dogs have to work to get them out i’m absolutely a huge fan of anything that you can shove kibble or any other treats in smear something in definitely keeps our puppies busy so we’ve got that there you can fill that all up and you can even fill something in here just another again a smear of something in there now the next one up on the list i think you’re really going to like this one most puppies do most puppies absolutely love to use their nose to sniff and explore right and so let’s give them something to safely sniff and explore by surprising them with a snuffle mat now if you’ve never heard of a snuffle mat before you’re in for a treat to me it’s like a shag carpet for dogs all right let’s see how big this thing is oh this is nice that’s a good size so what we have going on here we have all of these pieces of in this particular case this is made of felt all these pieces of felt and we can take i’m just ruffling it up since it just came out of the package here we can take and put our pieces of kibble all throughout now this becomes a really fun game for your dog as they dig and explore through the snuffle mat trying to find those little pieces of kibble this is also a great way to help your puppy if they’re a fast eater so if your puppy is a ravenous eater and they really love to gobble up their food too fast that’s not healthy for them it typically will make them sick it’s not good for digestion you can slow their eating down by putting their food in a snuffle mat this feels really good it feels pretty sturdy the back has a little bit of a rubberized texture to it all right and it looks like when i’m done with it if i want i can just roll it up and put it tie it up here it’s got some strings to tie up and put it away but we’re going to leave this out because again we are going to let our pups go to town on all of these fun toys to see which one they love the best all right what else did amazon deliver i feel like we’re on a first name basis with our ups guy here he’s always delivering fun stuff for the dogs so let’s see what this one is i’m pretty sure from the sound of it it sounds like a puzzle toy yes it is all right finally we have anita addison this is a really good puzzle toy it’s sturdy this company always makes some really good sturdy toys so this one will be really good if you heard me say before we want to make sure that our puzzles don’t have too many pieces especially if your dog is a major chewer so these ones have pieces that slide and swing which means that our pups have to learn to bat at them and paw these pieces around to be able to get in to these little spots where all the kibble is so i can cover it up with this or i can cover it up with the little fin it looks like it’s a little fin so i’m going to fill each of these up with a few pieces another great way to stop your dog from eating too fast okay so it looks like i might be able to add this here to kind of stop the fin from moving until your pup moves that out of the way so that’s another level of difficulty with this particular toy i love this it’s a great material it’s nice and strong and sturdy it does not feel cheap at all love it okay before i share my last toy with you don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so you get notified when next week’s article goes live alright here we go last toy all right one last box what else could we have possibly purchased these dogs are just slightly spoiled don’t you think hey it’s all so you guys can learn which of the best we don’t want you wasting money on toys that are no good this one looks fun this one is the made for pet slow feeder puzzle toy now remember a few moments ago i told you slowing down your dogs eating is crucial we don’t want them gulping it creates too much air in their system it’s going to also make them extra tutti you don’t want extra tutti dogs so we want to slow down their eating finally got into this thing looks like it comes with a couple of pieces here do we need to put together that’s okay puzzles for dogs puzzles for humans oh this looks good little rubberized piece here and it just kind of you just kind of shove it in there i wish i wish they would have done a better job on that one so you may want to adjust the height on this so you can go a little bit lower or a little bit higher but important to put in the little locking bolts so that the piece doesn’t drop up and down when your dog is batting at it they’re a little tight so i need to loosen them just a little bit oh things are flying all over but what’s happening is once your dog starts batting at these there’s little holes in here that the kibble’s going to fall out and then also this is a puzzle like toy at the bottom that also will slow them down from eating too fast as well so that’ll be a fun toy i think pickles is probably going to love this one the best he loves these kinds of toys ….
