My dog (a border collie/lab mix) isn’t too much of a chewer (no shoes, furniture, etc.), but she does do the “feminine products” routine. I’ve been trained to close the bathroom door a few days out of every month. It’s extremely gross if I forget. Blech.
Her weird chew habit is the metal casing of the sliding door in our living room…you know, the metal frame the thing sits in. The metal stuff gets on her teeth and I know it’s got to be bad for her. She’s crate trained and has a steady supply of chew toys given to her, but I guess she just likes the taste of the metal.
[slight hijack]My brother used to chew stuff when he was a kid. Once, when he was about 5, he was sitting in the back of the station wagon during a family trip. When they arrived at the destination, my mom found that he’d eaten the entire top of the styrofoam cooler. Completely gone.[/slight hijack]
Let me tell you how crazy my brother’s lab is. Vegas eats everything, including people. They ask the vet about it, says get some bitter apple.
So the next time she starts chewing on the table, they spray it with bitter apple. She licks it…gets a good taste of it…and proceeds to gnaw ON THE BITTER APPLE BOTTLE!!!
The next time they go to the vet, he asks about the chewing, and if the bitter apple worked. They told him the story, and he replies with a “Hmmm…never heard of that before…”
How did your girlfriend like your new shave, by the way? When I read the title to this thread, I assumed that this was an update of that older thread (here), and that your girlfriend had taken over the hair removal duties for you. (It sounded like it was both painful and fun for you.)
Oh geez, the bitter apple story reminded me of my favourite of Huc’s chew toys.
Hubby has two dog training videos - both have had the corners of the hard plastic cases chewed off.
By the way, one of my cats used to chew on the adapter cord for my answering machine. He stopped once he got through the plastic casing, though, and never chewed another wire again after that.
Yup, I knew this when I bought the crate. Read a bunch of articles, did some net surfing. Set the crate in the living room with the door propped open (so as not to accidentally close, startle the dog, and throw her off the crate thing forever), put a nice soft cushy pad in it, threw in a coule of dog treats…
Kelly took a look inside, sniffed a couple of times, and went on in. The bitch didn’t wanna come out for three days!!
But back to the OP…
Why do dogs always go through the closet and chew on ONE SHOE PER PAIR? Instead of eating one of the two pairs of shoes laying around they always eat one of each pair. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
When my dog Gizmo was about 6 months old, I started giving him the run of the place. I have a walk-in closet, and knowing Gizmo’s affection for shoes, I used to block off the closet. Until one day I forgot. I came home to a living room full of chewed up leather shoes, and a very happy looking puppy. He probably ruined about 15 pairs of shoes in a couple of hours. Of course, he didn’t actually chew up 30 shoes - but he did chew at least one of each pair.
Second chewing incident:
I used to put a small Christmas tree on top of my stereo cabinet. Since I have two cats as well as a dog, I put non-breakable ornaments on it - those little satin balls and a few little bird ornaments with real feathers on them.
One day I came home to find the tree knocked over on the living room floor, surrounded by naked plastic bird bodies covered with bite marks. No feathers anywhere. Feathers are apparently quite digestible. Obviously the cats and the dog conspired together.
Gizmo also has a thing for paper - used to love to take used kleenex out of the garbage can, and once ate about 1/4 of a phone book.
Well, I don’t know if this is a hijack or not, but my parents have a Siamese cat that eats wool. He’s eaten giant holes in all of their blankets and sweaters. More than once, my mother has been reading with the cat in her lap when suddenly she hears a little “scrunch, scrunch” sound, looks down, and finds the dumb cat has already eaten a hole in her pants! He’s also destroyed several stuffed animals and an upholstered chair or two. The vet has recommended giving him lanolin, but it doesn’t seem to have worked.
All the cavaliers we’ve ever had love tissues (used or otherwise)…
Our Labs have eaten:
walls, anorak zippers, used condoms (found by the dog while walking in the park…), cigarette butts (but stopped permanently after a lady threw one down still lit & he grabbed it & ate it…), car upholstery, rugs…
a long list that I’ll cut short here.
Val likes to like my shoes (he chewed one pair, but now merely licks the insides, or my feet if I sit still barefoot long enough).
As I mentioned earlier, my cat has a penchant for photos. He also gets, um, amorous with white stuffed animals, but that’s an entirely different thread…
My parents have to keep the litterbox where the dog (a black Lab, interestingly enough) can’t get it. They had to move it after they discovered that there was never any cat poop in the box, but there WAS visible dog drool.
I have a cat that at about 10 weeks ate a 5 foot chain of rubber bands my roommate had strung together while watching TV. We didn’t know what had happened to the rubberbands until we saw the kitty dragging himself around the apartment with his front paws, rubbing his butt on the floor. It looked like a worm coming out so I grabbed it with a paper towel (and nearly puked) the cat panicked, ran away and the remaining few feet of rubber came zipping out his rear end. The worst part was the random stuff that was stuck on the knots in the rubber bands. That cat must have had the cleanest colon in feline history.
