Ask Aunt Foley

Dear Aunt Foley:  What is it about stuffed dog toys that causes them to explode their guts all over our floor?  - The French Bulldogs

This is part of Big Stuffie’s business plan.  They don’t want to make toys that last so they make them with weak points and, if we chew with any force at all, we rip them, and the stuffing comes out.  That way our parents have to go out and buy us a new one lining the pockets of Big Stuffie.

Now if you are a good dog, like we are, you gently chew your toys so you don’t rip them open.   This takes a great deal of self control because it is part of our breeding to play with anything that squeaks going back to our days of being wild in a pack and rabbits had squeakers in them.We wouldn’t kill the little buggers, we would just walk around squeaking them, which angered the villagers, who, through selective breeding, stopped rabbits from squeaking so they could get a decent nights sleep.

Us dogs are nothing if not flexible, and, just as we learned not to walk around with a squirming rabbit in our mouths when they weren’t squeaking, we learned how to play with our toys without ripping them open.  Our toys were lasting for years.  But Big Stuffie was losing money.

So that’s when they put a sensor in all our toys.  When we are near them and there are no humans around, they make a whirring sound, and then poof, all the stuffing goes flying out of them, there is a large hole in the middle of them, and the sound draws our parents into the room, and they yell at us for doing the destuffing.

We look at them with our big eyes telling them that the toy just blew up but you know what?  They never listen.  They tell us that it’s impossible that it just blew up and then go off and get use another one, and sometimes, within just a few hours, poof, it blows up again and we get the blame.

So, until our parents learn the evils of Big Stuffie we are going to be at the mercy of the exploding toys that make us look bad.  And don’t get me started on self-ripping slippers.