— By Plasteurope.com staff — 

“We don’t talk about Bruno, no, no, no…” – although maybe it’s time that we should. Rather than your ostracised uncle, we’re talking about Bruno, the “Würzburg Dog”. Based at the German plastics centre SKZ (Würzburg; www.skz.de), Bruno tirelessly carries out his quality-assurance work testing the durability and safety of dog toys.

Of course, Bruno is no canine of fur, flesh, and blood, but, as the SKZ put it with ingenious precision, “a realistic simulation of a Golden Retriever’s chewing behaviour”. With “up to 10,000 chewing cycles at a specified bite load”, the sophisticated piece of equipment in the SKZ lab rigorously tests plastic dog toys to identify potential weak points and prevent breakage or swallowing of small parts. Bruno also tests the toys for weather/UV resistance and checks their levels of harmful substances like phthalates, bisphenol A, or heavy metals.

The SKZ reportedly plans to develop other animal-related testing models in the near future – initially for cats, sheep, and rats. After all, the (domestic) animal kingdom offers plenty of items for testing: scratching posts, exercise wheels, livestock balls, chew rings. Only turtles have had to trudge unamused through the wasteland of planet Earth for millions of years.