Help - Destructive Chewing

[Guest KEWood]

Prescription Glasses: $300

Arms of prescription sunglasses: $45

Boots: $200, repaired for $40

Boots: $125, ruined.

Books: too many to count

4 dark chocolate bars: $875 in vet bills

and the list goes on..........

 

Auggie, 3, whom we've had for 7 months today, has tendency to get a hold of things he shouldn't have and chews them to death when we aren't home. We are as diligent as we can be about keeping these items out of reach/behind closed doors/gates, but we sometimes lapse in our responsibilities. He has plenty of chewies and other chew toys, gets a kong when we leave in the morning, but we are otherwise at a loss on how to stop this destructive behavior. He is always caught after the fact, so being stern with him is pointless. We don't want to go back to crating him during the day for the rest of his life (that crate is huge and our house is small......). Any suggestions to help turn this behavior around???

 

 

[GeorgeofNE]

Muzzle.

 

And a LOT more exercise in the morning. A tired dog sleeps when you're gone. A dog who is bored and restless chews stuff.

[smurfette]

Paddy acts in a simliar manner when I fail with his exercises, not only walks but things for his very active brain, too. He loves to search for some treaties which I hide in the house or in cardboard boxes with lots of newspaper pages crunched into small balls - the treaties are in some of these balls but not in every.

 

It's a bit messy because it looks like a paper volcano erupted in our living-room but the dog is happy and tired.

 

On walks we practise things like "change" - changing from my left to my right side, and back, "look" - he walks next to me and looks into my face, "wait" - when arriving at a street. It helps to make him tired.

[ShebasMom]

Muzzle, more exercise, and more self-discipline to not leave things available for chewing.

[Guest GreyOrchard]

How old is he?

 

Also, note that most, if not all of what he has taken in your listing above are items which probably are heavy with your scent on it. We often forget how very important scent is to our dogs. If you have some old items he can have which would have your scent, give them to him.....or even if you take an old pillowcase, throw some old unwashed t-shirts in it and then sew it up, he might like that. You can put it in his bed.

 

As for the chocolate bars and the vet bill, that's quite vet bill for a common enough occurrence!

 

If you get in the habit of keeping your heavily scented things out of his reach and give him replacements that also have your scent on it, that could help a bit. Muzzling might make him very frustrated and cause other behaviours to emerge.

 

Plenty of exercise, ensuring the dry dog food is low protein, and giving him replacement items with your scent on it could help a lot, You might need to engage in a lot of exercise the first ten days, less the next ten days, and finally just have normal exericse thereafter. By then he would have had 20 days of inteference with the undesriable behaviour. That does not mean it will never ever happen again, but that the likelihood is diminished over time.