three couches
two stuffed animals
four remote controls
countless gloves and winter hats
two pairs of shoes
a hole into our drywall
my bridesmaid’s dress (yes, one I would have worn again) which was left by the fedex man by the front door. We were home. He never rang the bell. Just left it. My stepfather used to just let the dog out the door, as we have a fenced in yard.
no, we haven’t dumped her in the countryside yet. She’s crying for a “cookie” right now.
Bandit was crate trained, and kept in the crate while nobody was home. His chewing happened while I was home, but he would get to things so fast, even if I was doing something like cooking dinner or taking a shower. And he continued chewing far beyond the puppy phase, he was five years old before the chewing stopped. He had plenty of chew toys. He is a Border Collie/lab mix, so you have a dog that A. Gets bored easy, and B. Chews a lot.
I do believe in crate training, but the dog has to come out sometime.
I forgot one other dog incident, my BF’s dog Rocky. This was before I moved in. Rocky liked to go in the bathroom and den up. He would try and go behind the door, often causing the door to close. One day when my BF was gone, Rocky managed to shut the door completely. Then he panicked. Somehow he managed to turn the faucet on - the hot water, of course. He flooded the bathroom and tore it totally apart. Claw marks in the drywall, ripped window screen, and water everywhere.
When I first got Caseyboy, my Border Collie rescue, I crate trained him and he did really well at it. I than took to leaving him out in the day while Iwent to work.
I came home one day to find “my” spot on my leather couch shredded, along with pieces of my sunglasses and destroyed TV, stereo and VCR remotes. Casey was super pleased to see me home, of course, but it really, really sucked. I’m sure the whole time he was doing it he was thinking “ohboyohboyohboy I reaaaaly miss him. This is where he sits. He holds these things. I reeeaaaallly miss him…” as he destroyed my stuff.
He’s great now. I also moved into a new house 10 minutes from work so I’m home with him at lunch, and my wife who has a completely different day schedule to me is home a lot of the rest of the time. Plus we’ve got Lexie, our other Border Collie and his boss.
P.S. All my dogs were crate trained. It takes about five minutes for a German Shepherd to remove the carpet from a floor in such a way as to render it useless. FYI.
When I was 11 we had a springer spaniel that was highly attached to my mother. One day she made the mistake of locking him in the bonus room and then going outside for a while. When she got back in he had dug a huge hole through the drywall trying to get to her. I came home one day a few weeks later to discover that my parents had given him away.
My parents have a Siamese cat with an addiction to wool. In the first year that they had Shasha, he managed to destroy all of my mother’s sweaters, included the ones she bought in Iceland and dearly loved, most of the wool blankets and the upholstery off two chairs. My mother would be sitting reading a book or talking on the phone with Shasha in her lap, when she’d hear a little scrunching sound and discover that he’d eaten a hole in her pants. Altogether I’s say he’s easily caused over $1000 worth of damage.
Where was this information 6 months ago?
I too have a dog who destroyed carpet. Still don’t have the money to replace it, and it looks really bad now. It’s the berber style and she finds a loose thread and pulls.
We plan to go with laminate floors next.
She also goes through toys faster than any dog I have ever seen. We know she needs toys to keep herself occupied and away from our stuff, but damn it gets expensive. The only toys that survive past a few hours, or days if we are lucky are her kongs, and she gets bored with those, even with treats inside. She wants toys she can chew and shred.
I’ve lost a couple pairs of shoes, but only cheap ones. Plus other little stuff - pillows, socks, bath mats, etc. Her latest thing is unraveling the toilet paper, so we have to remember to keep the door closed, she’s really fast about sneaking in there! More mess than expense, though.
We had a dog that did much the same thing when I was ten. Came home one day and the dog had peeled up and chewed a 5’x6’ patch of linoleum from our dining room floor. Heck, if nothing else, it prompted the parents to peel up the rest of it and have a nice hardwood floor – and the linoleum was ass-ugly anyhow!
I am absolutely not trying to sound “snarky” here, but that’s where the training part comes into “crate training.” If your dog doesn’t take to the crate immediately, you will have to actually train it to like the crate. An internet search for crate training will provide you with all the information you’d ever need to train any dog to accept confinement, but the patience and time must be supplied by you.
Our then-3-month-old kitten, Trudy, somehow got herself stuck inside a $200 throw-rug-type tapestry thingy. There had to be an opening into the interior of the thing, but I couldn’t find it, and had to cut her out of it…
My dog likes his crate just fine, and always has. See, it’s not really about the crate itself in his case. He doesn’t like being in any confined space whilst alone, and this is a sticky problem that can take months, years, or never to resolve regardless of what you do. Since he is perfectly behaved when he’s not locked in somewhere, and all his destructive behavior came in relation to being confined, it was pretty much common sense to us to not crate him and allow him to be with our other dog, because that’s what this dog needed to be happy.
I’m sorry I said anything about this because my situation is a bit unique. My dogs didn’t come to me as puppies, they came to me as adults from an environment where they spent about 22 hours a day in a crate. So it’s not like they aren’t used to it, what they aren’t used to is being alone. And that needs to be dealt with, we have found, on an individual basis, since each dog is different. As I said, YMMV.
And, I know you don’t know me, so how could you know? but I spend a lot of time on breed adoption and owner support and education, so I know plenty about crate training. No one who knows me would ever call me a lazy owner who isn’t willing to take the time to train their dog. With the breed I deal with you just can’t have a ‘one size fits all’ approach. And really, that’s pretty much how it is in the rest of the world too.
When Murphy my 8 year old yellow lab was a pup, we crated her.
Or at least tried too.
I would get home and she would greet me happily at the door. It took several days to figure out that she was squeezing through a gap in the bottom of the wire crate. So, we wired that up and put up a baby gate just in case.
Getting out again ( through a gap in the top of the crate) was nothing for this dog and the baby gate was nothing either and the gate was not knocked down or askew. I still have visions of a 3 month old puppy pole vaulting over the contraption.
I came home from work one day to find two of my large potted ficus trees dragged to the middle of the living room floor and dumped out on the light brown carpet. And, every shoe in the house ( and we have alot as we are both Imelda’s) was around the big dirt pile. My mouth dropped to the floor.
Murph greeted me happily as if to say, " Hey, I had a great day at the office…how 'bout you."
It all actually cleaned up without a trace. But I really wish I had a camera on her that day because it would have been hysterical. We discontinued the crate shortly thereafter.
She has, on a side note, gone through our two screen doors countless times because of thunderstorms. Considering what some people go through, I’ll take it.
