March 18, 2007: Shayna retrieving two tennis balls at the same time
Practically since I adopted her, Shayna has been tennis-ball obsessed. That’s not particularly uncommon among dogs.
But one day, when she was about six months old and we were at the off-leash dog park (when she could still go there), she apparently decided that retrieving one ball was terribly inefficient, crammed two into her mouth at the same time, and brought them back to me, and set them at my feet. I and the people who witnessed this were very impressed, and let her know that.
From then on, this has been one of her mainstay tricks. And in 2004, she won the local dog trick competition for her two-ball retrieve… for which she also received a big hug from me.
Here’s some video of the trick, in which I use a Chuck-It to throw two balls perhaps 80 or 90 feet away, one at a time, and she brings both back to me at the same time. At age six, Shayna wanted to this over and over again, until she was completely exhausted:
