Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys

Breed-driven toy obsession and working instincts

• Many anecdotes of extreme ball/frisbee focus, especially in border collies, retrievers, spaniels, cattle dogs, sled dogs, and herding breeds.
• Dogs will play through pain, exhaustion, injury, cold, and even bleeding paws; owners sometimes must forcibly end sessions.
• Commenters link this to centuries of selection for single-minded work drive (herding, retrieving, sled pulling, hunting).
• Some breeds or lines buck the stereotype (e.g., non-ball-motivated border collies, poodles that “quit the rigged game”).
• Others note dogs strongly oriented to social contact or specific contexts (forest, hunting words) rather than toys.

Addiction vs “really enjoys it”

• The paper’s framing as “addictive-like” is questioned: is this pathology or just extreme motivation for a bred-for task?
• Several see clear parallels with human compulsive behavior: continuing despite harm, inability to self-regulate, no satiety.
• Others argue the study itself is cautious, explicitly avoiding calling it true “addiction” due to lack of benchmarks.

Debate over behavioral addictions in humans

• One line of argument claims “behavioral addictions” (screens, shopping, etc.) don’t really exist in mammals; labels are driven by rehab industries and DSM politics.
• Counterpoints:
  • Gambling is in the DSM’s “Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders”; people clearly persist despite life-ruining consequences.
  • CBT practitioners and others say compulsive, hard-to-stop behaviors are clinically real regardless of the label.
  • Examples invoked: gambling machine design, dopamine responses, GLP‑1 drugs affecting gambling, and the difficulty rational choice theory has with “weak will.”
• Some frame this as a moral-language-vs-medical-language issue (vice/sin vs disease/treatment), with criticism of both sides’ circular explanations.

Study design, journal, and impact

• Several note the work is in Scientific Reports (Nature-branded but not Nature proper), with modest impact factor.
• Concerns raised about reliance on owner surveys and jargon-heavy writing; others defend the journal as mixed-quality but often solid.

Managing and redirecting obsessive behaviors

• Owners describe strategies: removing toys, limiting fetch, using sniffing/brain games instead, or training structured fetch to avoid constant arousal and injury.
• Some intentionally avoid ball obsession in high-drive breeds; others repurpose it (e.g., truffle dogs, rat-eradication dogs, sled or pulling work).
• Laser-pointer play is highlighted as especially problematic: can induce long-term stress and unfulfilled prey drive.

Domestication, neoteny, and human parallels

• Multiple comments tie dogs’ perpetual “puppyhood” (neoteny) to their endless play drive; humans are suggested to be similarly self-domesticated.
• Several explicitly compare ball-obsessed dogs to humans doomscrolling or gaming compulsively, as a shared pattern of chasing engineered rewards.