Hi all Pepsi is 3 months old and she is obsessed with eating grass, chewing stones and all sorts of other garden matter!! I am constantly taking things from her mouth luckily she learnt to recal to me as soon as we got her at 8 weeks so I have the opportunity to take these things off her (long line of family gun dogs) my query is she can have a perfectly normal stool one minute then very very loose the next. She is perfectly fine in herself and still drinking lots so I'm just wondering if grass would cause this??
Hello and welcome. Lots of great advice here from many a lot more experienced than I. Don't want to burst your bubble but Pepsi is a long long way from having a solid recall, she is just following you around as they do for now. Use it, embrace this natural instinct and develop it into a reliable recall. It takes two years to achieve this. Get " Total Recall" if you haven't already. It will define your relationship with Pepsi in the future. Be careful how you take things off her and how you react to her eating EVERYRHING. They learn about the world by tasteing everyrhing but you can make it a game and make it worse by how you respond. I'm convinced my boy at 1 year has 10 kg of rocks in his belly. I'm also convinced that my obsession trying to prevent him from acting on this basic instinct made it worse... Get insurance. As a side effect of this behaviour her stool will vary from hour to hour. Monitor the changes and you'll see a pattern develop. If she has consistent runny or watery stool then you have an issue. If they are isolated it's likely something she got in to and I personally believe it's just her body sorting itself out. Duggan went through a phase where he was into ants and spiders so he was digging up a lot of random stuff but in the end he was spitting it all out. Yesterday he had a black poo... he ate charcoal from the fire pit. As I type he's chasing a spider around the kitchen. Now he's in the living room trying to find it. Lol. It's dead. It's protein. We can find a million ways to worry and fuss over our puppies and they can sense every time. Grass is harmless. Some owners actually give their puppies things they shouldn't have just to train them to give them up. Enjoy the process and remember, the more you reap the more you sew.
I ignore my pups when they pick up stones, they are just exploring and don't swallow them. If you react at all the stone then becomes valuable - because you want it and because it gets your attention. If you don't react at all they soon lose interest. Eating grass is fine and normal for dogs, but if you don't want them to do it more fibre in their diet will help.
Ah yep, Xena was (still is!) a great stone sucker and grass eater. Like Johnny Walker, I would freak out and try and pry it out of her mouth Ah well, we live and learn. Listen to @Boogie she's the puppy oracle. The odd soft poo isn't something to worry about, so don't fret.
@Boogie understand you ignore the stones, but do you ever worry about that potentially a tooth could get broken/damaged? That always seems to be my biggest concern.
As soon as the pup puts the stone down and the pup is doing something else (if she's brought it in) I remove it without fuss. Just make sure they have lots of legitimate thing to chew. @JulieT had a good method when Betsy was little. This is Mollie's box full!
Thanks @Boogie Vanilla has plenty of toys to chew, so issues on that front. I do the same once she has dropped it/got bored of it, I remove it. Just hope she never damages a tooth. She is far better than what she used to be.
