Bargains worth barking about

Walking into my local The Reject Shop store, I was amazed at the range – much better than my local supermarket, which only has 1 set of shelves for pet toys. Along with The Reject Shop’s own Pet Haven brand, you’ll also find the names you know from the supermarket such as Lucky Dog, Schmackos, and Whiskas.

I like getting fabric ropes for indoor play as they are much easier to clean up after being chewed through than the standard ones. I find the standard rope toys leave fine strings that clog up the vacuum cleaner head.

At the supermarket I usually pay over $5 each for a cloth rope or rope with attached tennis ball. The ones at The Reject Shop looked exactly the same and were only $2 each.

The only way to tell if a pet toy is any good is to give it to your pet, so I decided to do a bit of a test, employing my neighbours pets as well as my own to see if they’d give the various products a paws up.

With this goal in mind I spent a total of $50, grabbing dog and cat toys, some doggy clean up bags (can never have too many, and they are less than half the price of the supermarket), a leash, and some treats.

Barney (our office dog), and Tiffany, were the first test subjects. They both loved the standard and cloth rope toys, and Tiffany also had some fun with the chew ring.

A grey and blustery Melbourne winter morning didn’t stop the fun in the local dog park on Saturday morning where the neighbour’s dogs gathered to test the rest of the toys (and a clean up bag or two).

There’s a showbiz saying that you should never work with children or animals, and now I know why. Trying to photograph very excited pooches whilst playing fetch and tug of war proved more difficult than expected, and I didn’t get as many photos as I had hoped.

Marley loved catching the flying disc that also squeaked. He also worked out that he could make a noise just by pressing his paw on it.

Slugger couldn’t get enough of the ice cream-shaped toys, and ended up managing to mostly keep them away from other dogs, despite Tiffany’s best effort to steal one!

Being a sucker for anything that squeaks, Tiffany also loved the barbell shaped toys – the perfect size for running around with.

For the larger dogs, the tennis ball and launcher made sure they got a good run, helping to throw the ball further than possible otherwise.

When we got home, I had a very pooped pooch on my hands after so much fun.

It was definitely a big paws up from the dogs all for the toys, and the owners made good use of the clean up bags. I’ll definitely be heading back to The Reject Shop instead of the supermarket next time Tiffany needs new pet toys.