meta : pup

welp, the last great hope bit the dust today as the lil girl went for the gusto on this roughly 8-month-old chew toy slated as the ultimate for pups.

for meta they last about that long but only under 3 or 4 months of heavy chewin’

nonetheless, we are not dismayed – we will continue our tradition of kong because it’s still one of the best pup toys ever invented.

it isn’t hard to find more hardcore kong fans to agree with that :

here’s how the toy was born :

The story begins with a German Shepherd named Fritz who enjoyed chewing rocks. This activity wore Fritz’s teeth down and frustrated his owner, Joe Markham. One afternoon while working on his Volkswagon Van, Joe noticed Fritz dining on rocks once again. Out of desperation he disassembled the Volksie he was working on and threw the parts near Fritz to see if he could be coaxed away from the rocks. Radiator hoses didn’t work – neither did anything else until he pulled off a boot from around the suspension and gave it to Fritz. He loved it. The KONG was born! While Fritz invented KONG, it was Markham who realized the potential of this odd looking toy. Markham refined the toy’s design, developed a super-strong rubber formula and began production in 1976. Today, Markham continues to sell this toy as well as other great products all over the world.

you can hear him tell the story himself here.

meanwhile, in the slideshow below, you can see meta’s gone back to a delinquent rawhide in the meantime, which she likes to chew against a shoe, the back of a leg, anything that gives her leverage and is attached to/on/close to the people she really loves.

the fuzzy bits mixed in with the kong-remnants are pieces of a shag rug in the living room that they were tangled up in before pollee noticed and was able to act fast

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