Does this dog/ferret exercise machine exist?

My ferret loves to play fetch. I throw a tennis ball down the hall or down the stairs, and she runs after it, picks it up, and brings it back to me, expecting me to throw it again. I always get tired of this long before she does. I have heard that many dogs are the same way.

I got to wondering today if the process could be automated, sort of like the pitching/serving machines used in baseball and tennis, only more pet-friendly. I’m envisaging a contraption which takes a tennis ball from a basket and launches it in a direction and at a speed predetermined by the owner. The pet then fetches the ball and puts it back in the basket, whence it drops back into the machine and gets launched again. If the pet is smart enough to bring a ball back to an owner, then surely it won’t take long to learn how to bring it back to a basket.

I don’t think such a machine would be incredibly complicated. No robot arm is needed to grab the ball; just cut a hole in the bottom of a curved basket and let gravity do the work. The machine could be powered by electricity, or perhaps entirely pneumatically (i.e., the falling ball trips a switch which releases a puff of compressed air).

Needless to say, such a machine would be a boon to ferret and dog (and maybe even some cat) owners who love to play fetch with their animals but not for two hours straight. The only question is, has it been invented yet? And if so, where can I buy one?

Here is one but I am not sure if it would work indoors.

Welcome to the world of flyball! If you ever get a chance to go to a flyball tournament, it’s loads of fun to see.

Here’s what I pictured when I thought of a dog/ferret exercise machine.

And yes, it does exist. Sadly, it’s not what you asked.

On a similar note of answering not what you asked - These things are really cool. They enable you to throw a ball much further. The dog has to run further and will wear out quicker. As an added plus, you don’t have to touch a slobbery tennis ball.

Here are shareware plans for building your own flyball box. There are a bunch of people that build them, but if you’re handy I bet you could modify the plans to ferret-size and to hold more tennis balls. There are also mini tennis balls, around 1 1/2" diameter, that might be a better fit for a ferret mouth. You could probably use hackey sacks, too.

Yeah, judging from the videos it shoots the balls too high and too fast for indoor use. Maybe they’re adjustable, though…? Another issue is that ferrets don’t see very well, so you have to shoot the ball at a very low angle, near to the ground.