Go fetch!

[bradl]

 Be Careful What You Wish For!   A truly ball-crazy dog is a force to be reckoned with.

[Pepper Bug's Mom]

Pepper (now 9) dug and retrieved from day one!!! Brodie will not dig or retrieve but he also will not bolt and run away.  Pepper still will make a break for it if the opportunity arises!  Ha ha.  Both bark like crazy at squirrels but Brodie also goes nuts at birds...Pepper knows better but is also known as Zena Warrior Princess and Esther Williams (she loves to swim).  Brodie won't go near the water, digs his heels in.

[Dogcoat lady]

My Cairns and tennis balls!  A match made in heaven.  With Annie, she’d kick it out of her mouth as it was just a tiny bit too big to release it.  Ready for more and more …….relentless.

[Newman]

On 11/27/2017 at 8:44 AM, bradl said:

It seems to be an individual thing for the most part. We've had some obsessed with fetch while others could care less. Cairns are fairly reliable as object killers (hilarious watching one "shake" a dumbbell) although perhaps less so as retrievers.   

A pocketful of small treats and you can do a variation on clicker training with them to associate an item with a treat (touch them with the toy; hand 'em a treat; lather, rinse, repeat). Then they can develop  a motivation for getting a tossed object to exchange for a treat. 

Getting a reliable dumbbell retrieve from Stella was nearly the death of both of us. A local obed judge of 40 years told me in class that once she got it she'd be solid, and indeed she was. But I almost gave up many times on the way there.

Edited to add: Berneen is already "fetching" in one sense of the word!

That's gotta be one of my fav pics of a cairn lol