I recently adopted 7week old Bentley and wishing one week, he became listless and wouldn't eat or drink water. I became very concerned and immediately took him to the vet. The vet checked him out and took ex-rays of his abdomen. The vet showed me the ex-rays which revealed that Bentley had eaten two collars off off his puppy brothers when he was with his former owners. (That's a whole other story) Bentley has since had surgery to remove the collars and is doing well (He's 9weeks old now). He has shown us his true colors now and he's an eater... He eats everything. He eats: rocks, furniture, rugs, paper, cloth and more. The vet says that some dogs may not outgrow this habit. I hope Bentley will outgrow it! Does anyone else have an eater? (And I don't just mean chew... I mean completely EAT)
Kyko hasn't been bad at chewing the furniture so far, but every second step of his walks he has something in his mouth, his favourite things are stones (which he pretends he hasn't got & hides under his tongue, leaves, grass & mud. Have caught him a couple of times with a beer bottle top in his mouth . We are working hard on drop it and trading off for a treat doesn't always work though. Randomly throughout the day I will tell him to drop it when he's got his toys then treat him or sometimes just make a fuss of him. He's very intelligent though & has worked out if I pick something up I'll get a treat
One of buddy’s litter ate all of their collars! Luckily he was ok and poo’d them out, but what a worry! Buddy isn’t too bad but he doesn’t get left alone so he probably would eat something given half the chance. His worst one when we first got him was stones.... he will grab a sock here and there but as a result of the stone problem we implemented a ‘drop’ and he’s pretty good with most things now. This could be worth a try, have a look at this thread for the video https://thelabradorforum.com/threads/stones.24805/#post-377782 We adapted it slightly but same principle, and it worked great!
Ha ha, I did wonder when we taught buddy to ‘drop’ if he was then picking up stones and coming and looking at us knowing exactly what he was doing!! Anyway it still worked out ok and the problem stopped thank goodness!
Yes buddy does still do this.... I feel like if I tried to say ‘drop’ every time he picked something up we would never get anywhere!! I’ve let it go a bit on walks ha!
I tend to let it go if it’s grass or mud. Never the rubbish, this morning he was chewing a manky cigarette butt
Ooh no please don't tell me that, lol. Our puppy literally eats everything and I mean everything! We have to really watch her as she will eat something she shouldn't and then be sick at some point. We've tried endless so called strong toys that aren't. We had to look for edible chews as if you read the small print most of them can't be consumed!! We found yak milk chews the best. She loves stones and mud! We even had to buy yards of temporary fencing so she couldn't eat everything in the garden, stones, plants, flowers, bird food and so on. I'm really hoping she will grow out of this and can't bear the thought it might continue
Lincoln still likes to eat leaves and caterpillars but he hasn't been eating dirt or rocks for awhile so I think he's over that hopefully.
The good news is that the majority of puppies and dogs outgrow this behaviour. But you do need to supervise really closely every second the pup is out of the crate or pen or safe area, to ensure they are not eating stuff they shouldn't be. You will probably need to use a 2.5m puppy house line - like the one made by Clix - to be sure you can quickly ask for a drop any time this happens. The other thing to say is that pups which do this can quickly develop resource-guarding and this can lead them to swallow stuff really quickly - before you can take it off them (in their eyes). It can really be quite dangerous: The pup picks up something and you know they are going to swallow it and swoop on them, and they are doing all they can to swallow it even faster because they see you coming. This situation arises because too many times people have taken valued items off them and they now associate hands coming towards them when they have something, with this outcome - and try to protect themselves from it. Any attempt to move away from you, turn their head away etc when you are coming to take something off them, is a precursor of this behaviour. All puppies should be learning a 'Drop' cue as a fundamental part of raising a puppy. They should be learning this on 'normal' ordinary items to begin with and then on safe but not-ordinary items (shoes etc) which they can't instantly swallow. They should be learning to co-operate with you and to WANT to do a drop when they hear the cue, because they know what it means - there should be no conflict around this behaviour from the start. I like Chirag's approach to this, because he begins without even an object - so no potential for conflict:
