i would love to get my new puppy into playing with a ball over the park. how do you get a dog to love playing ball.

Playing ball and getting Spice interested was no problem! getting her to bring them back aahh that's the problem :D :D :D
We started with rolling a tennis ball along the living room floor and encouraging her to 'fetch'.

Footie has always been her favourite past time, she would put a lot of professional football players to shame with her tackles,but tennis balls with or without ropes attached, lose their fascination after about 1/2hr and get left in bushes or at the furthest point from me,as she goes off on one of her investigation sniffs,keeps me fit though :D :D

We started off with a brightly coloured football,strong construction and not too large in size,Spice is now on her 4th leather football and I have lost count of the tennis balls we have gone through,either lost in a tree,under a gorsebush or long grass,or simply peeled and chewed to a squishy pulp!

Indoors she will often pick up another toy of any description and 'bat' a tennis ball around the floor with it for ages, or she simply picks the ball up and tosses it high in the air,usually landing it in my plants or the t.v. screen
Jacqueline :)

Sorry to be a bit negative but the one thing i avoid is a tennis ball.

I have heard horror stories about how, if a tooth punctures the ball, the dog can swallow it.
John Rogerson the trainer told us at a recent working trials weekend that his own dog even managed to swallow a medium sized Air Kong which is of tennis ball like material.(The dog sicked it back up later!).

Lindsay
X

ok then how do i get her intrested in any ball

I got my bitch interested by playing piggy in the middle with my husband.

We got down on the floor and rolled the ball back and forth to each other. When we caught the ball we grabbed it up and made a big fuss saying"I've got the ball" while huggging it in tight.
We would then roll it back to the other one who did the same.

At first she just sat and watched but then she wanted to see what we were hugging. Then we would quickly roll it to the other person. This started the dog following tha ball to the other person to see what it was. Again it was snatched up before she could get it. She then tried harder to get it and so on until she was desparate to get it. This became a nightly game. She quickly learned to be quicker than us to get the ball and we made a big fuss of her when she caught it.

She was quite willing to give us it back to continue the game. This progressed to chasing a ball when thrown anywhere.

Any ball you use must be bigger than a dog can swallow. Obviously a burst tennis ball can be swallowed but a complete one would be okay depending on the size of the dog.

My small retriever  thought every yellow tennis ball in the world belonged to her. She never burst them. She ignored any other colour of tennis ball.

On the other hand I do not let my dalmatian chase tennis balls as he has a bigger mouth and a complete one could lodge in his throat and choke him.

Gofaster, what breed of dog do you have?

whippet

Always use balls on a rope so that you can pull it out should it get stuck. I never use tennis balls, lots have dogs have died either by them reinflating in the windpipe once puncture or by bits rotting in the gut.  The covering is also abrasive to dog's teeth.

Aren't tennis balls used for flyball?

be carefull what you wish for ;) I had the same idea - how do i get buster interested in a game of ball. Well now hes interested he will try to force you into a game of ball but he wont stop! he is addicted He gets withdrawral symtoms if he cant have a ball in sight. Once in the caravan (we had just set everything up which took 2 hours) we noticed buster was not himself, withdrawn, sad and seemed a bit lost, he loves the caravan so we were puzzeled. Well as soon as the toys were unpacked he sprang to life when he saw his ball. Now i ask myself WHY did we get him interested in a game of ball lol.

Another whippet owner! :D

My pup Cashie (now 5 months) took a while to get the hang of retrieving.  He would quite happily chase toys but preferred to run off with them!  Once his recall was pretty good, I used to call him when he picked up the toy, then once he had run back to me instead of taking the toy from his mouth I would swap it for a liver treat.  This method seems to work pretty well.  He also responds much better to toys that make a noise, his favourite being a squeaky hedgehog.  I don't know if this is a whippet thing or just him, but it's worth a go.  Also, you may want to get one of those ball throwing devices (I think they're called Launch-a-ball, but I can't swear to it), as I find that by the time I've straightened up from throwing anything, he's already got to it!

Re safety:  I have to admit that I let him play with tennis balls.  I wouldn't have thought that a whippet would be likely to swallow a punctured tennis ball but other posters on here have a lot more experience than me so it's probably wise to take their advice, especially as there's always a chance that another, bigger dog with a much stronger bite could get hold of the ball.

Regards