Toys for Blind Dogs and a 'white stick' alternative!

Blind and deaf pets can live happy, healthy, quality lives. In fact, sometimes it's hard to tell them from sighted pets. They do, though, have their own special needs.
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JaynTinks
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri Feb 13, 2015 1:45 pm

Toys for Blind Dogs and a 'white stick' alternative!

Post by JaynTinks »

I did a P interest page of toys that would be good for Blind/VI impaired dogs and some my own dogs enjoy.

https://uk.pinterest.com/katilea9/toys- ... d-vi-dogs/

As well as dog toys I find some that are designed for babies are also good if your dog doesn't destroy toys. I got Inca a few 'sensory baby' toys that have different textures and a different sound. I'll put photo's of them up after she's opened them tomorrow on her birthday.

I also had the idea of using a special 'goalball' football for blind (humans) as a tool effectively like a white cane for totally blind dogs. Of course the dog would have to be ball orientated, it would certainly work for my collie and the bells inside make different sounds depending what surface they are on...so if your dog was walking along a farm track and there was a pot hole the ball dropped in, the jingling of the bells would suddenly speed up briefly then stop if ball got stuck in middle...giving the dog a clue there was a dip there. You may have to teach them what the sounds mean first in a safe environment that they've already mapped out, but a bright dog should be able to apply that acquired knowledge to another environment then and pushing the ball ahead enable him/her to know whether the ground is tarmac, changing to grass, whether there's a slope there the ball has rolled down or if ball rolls back to dogs feet an indication the ground is changing to an up slope.

May work better with a dog 'going blind' so you had time to teach it while it had sight, teaching it to 'listen' to the bells, so hopefully by the time it lost all sight it would understand how to use the ball effectively to find his way around. Kind of the same idea as that blind kid that used sonar clicks to guide him (he was on telly I forget his name but he'd had eyes removed as a child due to cancer).

So instead of using one of those Halo things for dogs and dog knowing it had reached a wall because the halo touched the wall first, the ball would roll back off a wall and the sound would be different...(obviously if your dog is deaf as well this idea won't work that well!)
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