Someone asked me recently how old Lucy is and I realized that she has been part of our family for 7 years now. She was born sometime in 2004 and came to us in January of 2005. Sometime this year, she will be 8 years old! Wow! I can't believe how time flies.

In the years that she has been here, she has chewed up many, many toys. It is her favorite activity. Her average time is about ten minutes, even for so-called indestructible toys.

The first and last $10 soft toy we bought:

The soccer ball -- one of her favorites, I think. She adores chasing the ball around the yard until it pops. The kids behind have lost many balls over our fence.

After some experimentation, we discovered that she prefers man-made products to "natural" ones. Rawhide and Greenies just get buried (I use that term loosely) in the backyard. But Nylabone products get carried around and and chewed on until we throw them away. And they take her a lot longer to chew up too!

Of course, we also have little bits of plastic all over our house, like little burrs. No one walks around our house barefoot.

She also has a tire, yes, that's right, a tire. It's about the size of a wheelbarrow tire, but is actually made out of pet-safe materials. The "tread" is paw marks. Of course, it smells terrible and leaves big black marks on the walls. The tire is her outside toy. She has chewed up at least two of them so far. Like the Nylabone products, it actually takes her months to work through.

She also loves chewing up tennis balls. She carries them around for awhile, squeezing them until they pop (and by the way, she popped the one racquet ball we gave her the same way). Sometimes she will even let you throw it for her to chase down and re-capture.

Once she has popped them, the painstaking work of peeling off the felt begins. Yes, that's right, she peels off the felt, then bites off little pieces of the rubber and makes a pile. Occasionally, she checks that that the pieces she has bitten off are acceptable?/small enough?/in the pile?/something else? I have no idea what she is looking for, but she checks the bits that she drops into the pile every once in awhile.

For Christmas, she got a Kong ball. This is a hard, solid rubber ball. It bounces, sort of. Lucy adores this toy. AND, despite many tooth marks in the surface of the ball, she has not yet gotten any chunks out of it. I think it must be a little too big for her to get her back teeth (the chewing teeth) into it.

So, there you have it. I'm sure I have taken many more pictures of Lucy chewing things up than I could find to post in Photobucket, but I have added there the ones I could find easily under Lucy/Lucys Toys.

Finally, she has also nibbled on (tasted?) a few things that were not dog toys: her plastic water bowl, the plastic roof edge of her dog house, the wooden corner of the coffee table and the unknown-man-made-substance heel of one of my shoes. But those are separate stories for another day.