We have adopted a ten month old Labrador who is doing really well with basic training and recall but if he sees a football in the park he makes a bee line and I can't get it off him. I manage to get tennis balls off him with treats but have tried frankfurters and chicken but he just runs off and eventually bursts the ball. Please help! Judith
Hello, and a warm welcome to the forum! I know a great deal about this subject....I have the world's best (or worst, depending on how you want to look at it) football thief. We go long periods between football thefts these days, but we still live in terms of it's been 2 weeks and 3 days since Charlie last stole a football. Charlie last stole a football on the 21st May. It was a super cheap inflatable one, that popped within seconds of the theft. This type of football theft can go either way. The owners can be not all that annoyed because it was very cheap, or super annoyed because it's ruined. I got lucky last time, and they weren't annoyed. Phew. The worst is when your dog nicks a very expensive leather football off teenagers playing (what they think is) a serious game. They are always annoyed. They also invariable chase your dog, without any chance of catching him if he is at all skilled at his thieving, and this makes it worse. It's harder to get the ball back, and the teenagers get more annoyed. Then you have to stand there while they examine every inch of their expensive ball for damage. The good news is the ball is less likely to be damaged. Anyway, practical things first when you are dealing with a serious football thief: Always carry enough cash with you so you can offer to pay for a damaged football. Always say sorry, and never argue with the annoyed person who has lost a football. Just say sorry and offer to pay for it. Then, training. First, you have got to minimise the times your dog nicks a football. You have to do this by being faster at spotting footballs than he is. If you work at it really hard, you'll be able to hear the whack of a football as well as he can. Put him on a lead and avoid him chasing the football. The more he chases and nicks a football, the more he'll want to do it. There is no way round this - do not have your dog off lead around footballs. Then, you have to work on him giving you a football once he has nicked it (because your dog is a footballaholic, there will come a time when he falls off the wagon and nicks a football again, no matter what....). You do this by training, and proofing a 'give' cue. You need to work very hard at this, and you need him to be able to give you really amazing exciting things. It's difficult, but you can do it. It won't ever be 100% but you can get it quite close. You start by using boring balls and a clicker (don't use food as a bribe, that won't work in the long term). You can look up 'clicker retrieve' to learn how to do this. After that, you need to work on a stop and recall when your dog is heading towards a moving football. You need to work on 'set ups' for this, and so you need a helper with a football. Your dog should never get the football he is headed towards, but should get a football as a reward from you. The book 'total recall' will help, and you can search articles for 'stop whistle'. Anyway, best of luck with it!
Sorry, the other thing is: invent a game involving his own football that is the most exciting game in the whole world. Really build up the value of the game over time. In this way, you can play his exciting game as a reward for not chasing other people's footballs, and reward him for keeping his attention on you around footballs.
This is really useful advice thank you Julie, we also have a pup obsessed with footballs!!! Sam and Mole
HeeHee - I've spent a lot of time on this! The other thing is do a lot of desensitisation to people playing with footballs. You can start in your garden but it is very difficult to recreate many people having a game with a football, which is much more exciting than a training set up, although if you have a large garden (I don't) and lots of people to help (I don't) you could do quite a bit in a set up. So walk up and down the park (with your dog on lead) while people are kicking footballs around - stay at a distance where your dog can still think. You can try this on a long line too, but it is difficult to stop a dog with a long line if he is likely to take off at high speed to a football - I don't think that is the best use of a long line really.
Bella has over the last few months also got an obsession with footballs and rugby balls and thinks nothing of stealing them , from anyone so I just keep putting her on the lead when I see balls but not always quick enough. luckily she has never burst one, she just wants them. I get more stressed when she heads for the kids tho!!! but she only want their ball... I must try some of the above. I have styed away from playing games with her with any balls tho in case that makes it worse (plus she is not even supposed to chase balls with he knees!).
Depriving a ball obsessed dog of balls can go either way, I think. You can remove balls completely, or you can try to desensitise the dog to balls. Depriving Charlie of balls makes the whole thing a billion times worse, and it's worse again because I can't remove all balls - balls belonging to other people and other dogs. To not use balls myself would mean Charlie only ever got a ball he nicked (and he would) so that would mean he was generally deprived of balls but once in a while got a massive reward of nicking a ball, which is a perfect recipe for making it all a whole lot worse. Although I think it is true to say Charlie is probably genuinely obsessed with balls, not just very, very keen on balls. This one thing has taken hundreds of hours of training to get even remotely under control. Uncontrolled chasing of balls, playing with frisbees, jumping up on back legs etc are all terrible for joints. Training control around balls, controlled ball games with rules, and even retrieving when the dog has to slow and hunt for a ball are all fine though. Well, for Charlie, of course it depends on your own particular dog.
I met a collie yesterday who was obsessed with footballs. He had his own (popped) football which he took everywhere with him. He'd also drop it at absolutely anyone's feet to get them to kick/throw it It certainly meant he left other balls alone. ..
Yes, Charlie has the same hallmarks of obsession as you can see in BCs. I do think the problem with allowing the obsession to that degree, ie the dog goes everywhere with a football, is that you are stuck with that. I know three BC that are fine, the perfect dogs, so long as someone is throwing a ball for them. As soon as the ball throwing stops, they are jumping up, barking, getting into scraps with other dogs and so on. It's like the ball displaces all other activities, and they don't know how to do anything else. So allowing a dog to obsess on balls you provide is an option, but....
I would agree obsession is a double edged sword. You can use it to advantage but if it trumps everything else you can have a dog that doesn't actually function without the object of obsession and even when that is present the dog can focus on it to the exclusion of everything anyway. Doesn't sound like much fun to me.......
Yes, some dogs are just more likely to end up like this than others. I was flicking bits of kibble across the carpet for Charlie last night - just a game. Within about 5 goes, he was transfixed on my hand. He couldn't move from the posture he was in when he got the last bit of kibble. Stock still, frozen, deaf, just fixed waiting for the movement. I stopped doing it pretty quickly....
My mother's collie is obsessed with sticks and balls etc, as you are describing above. So was the collie that went before her. She will find any little bit of rubbish, from a stick to a ball to a plastic bottle, and will constantly drop it at your feet, almost tripping you up. It is hugely irritating! Then when she recognizes that you will not kick or throw it, she rushes off to the nearest person and does it to them! You have to shout 'Please DONT throw the stick!! I said, please DONT... oh, never mind...' and then walk on and hope the dog will eventually follow you; in the meantime they are stuck to their new best friend like velcro. Collies are I think exceptionally intelligent and really need to work; they are quite likely to exhibit obsessive behaviors if they have no other outlet for their intelligence and energy. That said, Poppy is also a bit obsessive about tennis balls; it is a side effect of being a keen retriever, I think. OH takes a ball on most walks with him; I don't as I don't want her to become fixated on balls to the exclusion of all else. As a general strategy, finding another outlet for your dog's energy is probably the best long-term strategy - gundog training, agility, search and rescue, etc. Short-term... well, I think Julie has said it all!
Snowie used to be a ball thief, but only ones the size of a tennis ball. Thankfully not a football thief, because that can get very expensive! He'd even take a ball out of a child's hand, of course waiting for what he probably thought was a good amount of time, but if the child didn't realise Snowie wanted him to throw the ball, after a minute or so Snowie lost patience and would grab the ball. Not a good thing -- child's hand would invariably get hurt (not seriously, but a knock of a tooth is painful). I became very adept at seeing balls before Snowie did (good thing he's a bit of a galoomper!). But now an interesting thing: when he got diagnosed with a bulging disc, the vet said no ball retrieves due to the jolting action. The first few times we went to the usual grassy area for our evening walk where tons of dogs are retrieving their balls, Snowie would look at me and bark, asking for his ball. I'd have to ignore him. In the past, he'd race after other dogs' balls as well. But since I was not throwing a ball for him anymore, he stopped wanting it. And stopped chasing other dogs' balls. And also stopped chasing children's balls, eg when they were playing cricket (he has lapsed a couple of times, maybe two or three times). I found this fascinating. And yet I suppose it was simply a case of breaking a habit. Now, when we go to that grassy area, he no longer asks for his ball (it has been 5 months since we stopped the ball retrieves), and now he loves racing around to meet other dogs and sniffing and marking all the trees. At home we play gentle games with his ball, because of course he is still a retriever at heart. But these entail hiding his ball, or gently rolling his ball at a slow speed, or he goes to the top of the stairs and tosses his ball down to us and we throw it back up to him, etc.
I can't count how many times this same scene has played out in my house! His pic in my avatar is the "transfixed on stick" look!
Tara has watched so many games of football, on the park pitches that she has lost interest. Similarly she does not bother the old folks on the bowling green anymore!
That's great advice from julieT. I've been on the other end of this last year (before we had Enzo) playing football with my little boy who was 5 at the time on the field opposite the house, with a BRAND NEW shiney yellow leather football, a lab appeared from nowhere to steal the ball from isaacs feet and proceeded to try his best to burst it lots of nice teeth marks in the ball, fair to say Isaac wasn't impressed and when I said to the guy that the dog should be on a lead where children are playing I was met with a fair bit of abuse about it only being a ball, not the best way to deal with the situation in my opinion. It may just be a ball but to people who may not afford to spend £30 on footballs willy nilly or to children who like and care for particular things it's often good to see things from both sides. Our house at the moment is full of footballs trying to desensitise Enzo to them, whether this works remains to be seen
