Dog lovers will probably agree: There’s lots of sticks in the world, and not all of them are good.
Sometimes they’re covered in mud. Sometimes they’re too spiky. Sometimes you can’t find one, and when you do, it’s basically just a trumped up twig.
According to the Guardian, Andrew Taylor from North Canterbury in New Zealand had a similar problem. So he decided to do something about it: He whittled down a dozen tree branches to multiple versions of the perfect stick and put them together in a box called, “Stick Library.”
Anyone visiting Taylor’s local dog park is invited to take a stick out of the box and return it once finished.
Stick library for dogs. pic.twitter.com/VSS550Togl
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) December 18, 2019
“While trimming the trees, my dad found himself with a lot of dead branches, and knowing from experience how hard it can be to find a good stick, and that the new dog park was opening soon, he had the idea that he would save them and put them in some kind of box,” Tayla Reece, Taylor’s daughter, told the newspaper Metro.
“He decided to call it the stick library because it implied that you return the stick once you’re finished with it.
“There was a disbelief of how simple the idea was, but it’s one of those ideas no one had thought of,” Reece said.
Some people online have expressed concern that the sharing of sticks is a sure-fire way to spread kennel cough, a highly contagious respiratory disease, and pointed to the risks of a dog accidentally ingesting parts of a stick.
Nevertheless, Reece told Metro that around 50 people turned up in early December to try the box, and one person even brought their cat.
