In all honesty, the StrongScore was born out of pure frustration.

I, too, regularly bought "strong dog toys" for my dog, only to find myself holding a broken toy during the very first play session.

At some point, the frustration and the pile of broken toys became large enough. This had to be better.

So I started testing products with my own dog, Chase, a large East European Shepherd who is certainly not gentle with toys. Many products with terms like "extra strong" or even "indestructible" on the packaging didn't last ten minutes.

But there were exceptions. Toys that did withstand intensive tug-of-war, training, and daily use. I kept looking for such products.

After about a year of testing, FurFun was finally created.

StrongScore was therefore not conceived as a marketing term after our webshop already existed. On the contrary, it is one of the reasons why FurFun exists at all.

Of course, one dog doesn't tell the whole story. That's why we didn't stop with Chase.

We assembled a test team of enthusiastic destroyers, mainly herding dogs and power breeds. They test our dog toys over a longer period and in various ways.

We look at things like the material, construction, seams, and attachment points, but most importantly, what happens when real dogs play with them.

We test products both during normal use and outside of their intended use. We do the latter deliberately. Not because we recommend using toys that way, but because we want to know where the weak points are and what happens when a dog goes just a little further than the product is intended for.

The test team also plays an important role in the development of our own FurFun products. This allows us to assess materials, constructions, and designs in practice before a product appears in our webshop.

A product only receives a StrongScore when we have enough experience to be able to say something meaningful about it.

The StrongScore ranges from 1 Soft to 5 Extreme Strong and is intended to provide quick insight into the durability of a toy.

One thing is important:

StrongScore 5 does not mean indestructible.

Nothing is indestructible. Even toys with our highest StrongScore will eventually be destroyed by a dog if they play with it long enough or in the wrong way.

A good example is the Durafoam ball with rope. We use it intensively every day. Chase regularly walks around with it for hours, and we use it for tugging games, fetch, and training. For us, such a ball typically lasts about six to eight months before the rope eventually breaks.

This is emphatically not a guarantee that the same ball will last six to eight months for your dog. Every dog plays differently. It primarily indicates what we mean when we say a product is particularly strong with normal use.

Therefore, use the StrongScore as a tool to compare different types of dog toys and choose a toy that suits your dog and the way you play together.

Perhaps the most important part of the entire StrongScore system.

Strong toys are not automatically chew toys.

By normal use, we mean that a product is used for its intended purpose. Tug toys are used for tug games. A ball is used for retrieving and playing together. A bite pillow is used during training.

Our main rule of thumb is simple: do not allow chewing unless a product is specifically designed for it.

If you leave a bite roll, tug, or other interactive toy unattended in the basket so that your dog can chew on it for an extended period, the use changes completely. Even extremely strong dog toys can eventually succumb to this.

StrongScore therefore assesses strength during intended use. It is not an indication of how many minutes a dog can chew on a product unsupervised.