My new theory on dogs burying stuff

I've developed a new theory on why dog's bury stuff; maybe they don't do it on purpose.

These two dogs are monsters.  The German shepherd, in particular, is a frisbee monster.  She loves to chase them to the point that she can't help herself, regardless of how tired she is.  I use it to give her exercises until she's to the point that she can't keep her tongue in her mouth.  When we go in the house, she just flops in the floor, normally after splashing water out of her bowl to lay in.  (Here, they were playing and biting each other, and I thought it looked funny.)

Anyway, the German, Ruby, loves to chase it, as I said, but she's also figured out that she can "throw" it for herself.
She'll set the frisbee on the ground and scratch it backward between her paws, with her pause getting closer together the further back she goes, squeezing it until it folds in half.  Then she'll push it up with her nose until it pops out of her paws and jump to catch it.  It only takes a couple of times before the frisbee is bent permanently and flies funny.  Between that and her chewing it for fun and pulling pieces off of it, they don't last long.

So then we get to the little red dog, Ginger.  She's learned from Ruby to paw at it and play with it, but she doesn't do the same thing.  She just scratches at it, kinda like she is digging a hole, to throw it behind her or to the side.  She doesn't seem to try to catch it, just enjoys kicking it around.  Luckilly, she doesn't deform the frisbee.  But she does leave large sections of the yard torn down to sand.

So I've been working on remodeling our rental after work, and I haven't had any time to play with them this week.  I decided to throw the frisbees a couple of times before I left for work, then I went to get them picked back up (so that Ruby didn't shred them while I was at work).  Ginger had taken hers to one of her favorite sand pits and was kicking it around.  I bent over to get Ruby's from her and when I looked up, Ginger was looking around confused and the frisbee was nowhere in sight.  I knew she had kicked sand over it probably, but figured I'd turn it back up fairly easily.  But it wasn't easy.  I went over the whole stretch of sand 3 times before I had to leave for work, and did it several more times after I got back before I finally found it.  So, long story short, I wonder how many other "buried bones" were simply accidents.

Anyway, here's some more pictures of the dogs and some more info.  Mostly Ginger, since I'm really doing this post for the woman we got her from.  We picked her up at one of those "free puppy" stands on the side of the road, and the woman had made up cards with her contact info and wanted pictures of the puppies when they got older to see how they turned out. 

Ruby often sleeps with her tongue out.  Ginger does it occasionally as well, but not nearly as often and I haven't gotten a picture.  Her leg is shaved here, so it was probably just after her spay, but she was in for something else at one point, so it may have been that.

Playing, pretty much just like the first picture

 These next ones are pictures of them playing right after we got Ginger.  (The first one I thought was cute, but it is a lousy picture).

Ruby is full-blooded, although not registered so I can't prove it.  She's VERY laid back most of the time.  Ginger is half Weimaraner, one quarter American bulldog, and one quarter Doberman.  Ruby loves to play tug of war, but she doesn't seem to want to bite hard.  She wouldn't make a very good attack dog, although as just a "guard" dog, she'd do fine; her bark does get scary.  Ginger also loves to pull, but she has a lot of bite strength, probably from that bulldog/Doberman mix.  I don't know if she can out pull Ruby, but she's close.  She definitely holds on a lot better, though.  Ruby just likes to get her canines stuck in whatever she is pulling instead of actually biting.  She very seldom manages to get the rope away from Ginger if Ginger doesn't want to let go.

More playing in the floor, biting each other.

 This was taken when Ginger graduated obedience class at Pet Smart.  She had just gotten her spay surgery, so the shirt was to keep her out of her stitches.

This is just her being kinda stupid, and got her head stuck in the sheet.  It took her a bit of thrashing and growling and chewing at it to finally figure out how to get it off of her head.

They had been playing, and then fell asleep this way. They woke up when we tried to get the picture, though.

I'll try to get pictures of them playing with the frisbee one of these days.  Ruby can catch it most of the time, but Ginger hasn't quite got the hang of it.  If I can get it to hover and come down slowly, she'll grab it.  But even though she chases it well, she hangs back for the attack instead of doing a running jump like Ruby does.  So if it is going forward very fast, she waits to long and it lands on the ground instead.

(Here's a side note on breed capitalization, since I was looking it up.  One style of capitalization says to capitalize parts of a breeds name that are based on proper names, but not other parts.  Weimeranar is based on the name of the name of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Karl August, whose court was based in Weimar, Germany (link).  So Weimeranar is based on a proper name, and therefore is capitalized.  Also, Doberman is based on the name of the tax collector Karl Friedrich Louis Dobermann, from Germany (link), so Doberman gets capitalized.  American in American bulldog is based on a place name, but shepherd and bulldog are both common nouns, so they don't get capitalized.)