Who Wants to Play?

Chesapeake Playing With His Busy Ball

I am often asked whether my animals like to play with toys.  The answer is that they all love to play, but there aren’t too many toys they enjoy.  Sheep, goats, alpacas, and chickens don’t have any formal toys.  Sometimes I hang some fruit from a string and the chickens seem to enjoy pecking at it, but I would hardly call it a toy.  The sheep and goats love to run around, play tag or king of the wood stump, but they don’t really have any toys that they play with.  The pigs on the other hand like to play with various objects.  Their favorite toy is their busy ball.  A busy ball is a hard ball that has holes in it.  You stick in some pig food and the pigs push it around the house hoping a morsel or two fall out through a hole.  Finnemore plays with this for only a very short time and then realizes the amount of food coming out is hardly worth his efforts.  He then goes and pursues other games.  Chesapeake on the other hand can play with the busy ball for hours.  Even when he was a piglet he enjoyed pushing the ball around the house.  It is fun to watch him because he is obviously enjoying himself.  His tail wags, he has a smile on his mouth and a twinkle in the eye.  He even pushes the thing around when there is no food in it.  Another toy the pigs love is a newspaper.  This is cute to watch them play with it, but it kind of makes a mess.  They love to shred the newspaper up and make a huge pile.  They love shredding all paper, but particularly newspapers because their are several layers that they can shred.  Shredding newspaper is only helpful when you are trying to make a fire in the wood stove and need some shredded paper to get it going.  Otherwise, they just make a mess, but they have fun doing it.

So the animals at Piscataway Acres play a lot, sometimes with toys and sometimes without, but they love to play.