Our sadist dog is obsessed with the squeak of his seven £1 balls

My wife derives grim satisfaction from buying dog toys that advertise their indestructibility, and then watching as the dog destroys them, often within hours of their purchase.

- Tim Dowling

“That came with a one-year guarantee,” she says, pointing to the fragments littering the rug.

The dog reduces heavy duty rubber bones to tiny pellets, and rope toys to threads. A lot of dog toys are made to resemble a dead animal - a squirrel, say, or a duck - with some kind of crinkly material inside. They’re designed to be tortured at length, but the dog is only interested in their immediate dismemberment.

During her quest my wife discovers a straightforward dog ball that squeals when you squeeze it, and also when you unsqueeze it. The dog alternates between applying and releasing pressure, eliciting the continuous piercing cry of a small mammal in distress.

“They’re only a pound each,” my wife says. “I bought seven of them.”

The scale of her mistake becomes apparent by the afternoon. The sound of the squeaking ball is maddening and constant - the dog never gets tired of it. And there are seven balls, so there is always one that’s rolled behind something, waiting to be discovered by a dog on a desperate, room-by-room search.