Both of my Labs, but especially my Pup Cooper, like to chew up wood. Fortunately they don't take after furniture, but anything else sees like fair game. I gave up on having a wood box near the fire place and keep it in the shop now. If she walks into the shop, she will usually come out with a chunk of scrap wood, so I generally try to keep her out of the wood shop. Mostly she just goes out in the yard, and picks up a stick to chew up. We have a dog door, and our back yard has about 20 large trees in it, so there are always branches on the ground that she can grab. It does not seem to hurt her any, but we constantly have wood chips and twigs all around the house. Tilly has been known to chew up sticks also, but it is mostly Cooper. Does anyone have any suggestions about stopping our 75# wood chuck? If we see her with a stick in the house, we tell her no and take it away, but often we don't see it until there is a pile of wood chips on the carpet.
It is very difficult, and probably not worth it, to train your dog to not do something while you are not there for a very significant period of time. Although it is not very difficult to train your dog to leave something while you are not there temporarily. So it is not difficult to train a dog to leave a pile of wood left by the fireplace - that's just the same as training a dog to leave a plate of food, for example, which is easy to do so long as your absence is time limited. Training your dog never to pick up any wood at all, even when left to its own devices, is much harder and restrictions and supervision is probably the easier option. To train a leave it that is robust to you leaving the room (leave a plate of food, or a pile of tempting logs - it makes no difference) here is a useful video:
Perhaps a long shot but just watching the video on Pippa's post about positive training and going in and out of doors, I wonder if you could do clicker training but on leaving the wood/branches. I'm sure it will take time but I use C&T for nearly everything. Obviously you have many many trees so maybe not so easy. Hopefully someone who has more knowledge about this will come along soon with help. You could also try lots of fun games to help occupy Cooper and distract her.
If neither is swallowing I wouldn't bother. Bending over to pick up sticks is awfully like an activity in fitness classes that I PAY to go to. You could consider it free exercise class. Jet used to chew sticks but not swallow. I gave her a piece of hard cherry to work at and she enjoyed it greatly. Outside though, no little piles of sticks to pick up, except maybe brush off the deck. Oban swallows and our back yard used to be reforestation. I just watch and take them away from him. For some reason he's worse about this in winter than in summer.
I agree with JulieT's comments. We've always had lots of trees around and Juno loves sticks. However she has a very strong "Leave" coupled with a very strong "Give" but she has never been left unsupervised in the garden or allowed to chew sticks. Sticks break into small slivers of wood which can be swallowed and can cause internal damage to the throat and intestines.
I'm going with Snowshoe. Not that I have a lot of choice. As far as I can see she doesn't swallow wood, or if she does it is in really small pieces. Since our whole back yard is trees, I'll never have all the ground stick free so we will just live it I guess. We just have to vacuum the rugs more often. I hope I can break the habit of stealing fire wood from the box, but I can live with that if I can't. We give them a lot of sterile bones, elk antlers, rawhide bones and bully sticks, but I can't afford to keep them in so much rawhide and bully sticks that they don't have time to eat wood. Both are powerful chewers. I think they would go through two large rawhide chews a day if they had a choice.
Tara has always eaten sticks, if no other fare is available in the park! I queried this with my vet, as I was concerned she might damage her insides (especially after the ear ring episode), but he seemed happy, as long as she was chewing twigs or bigger. His only concern seemed to be cocktail sticks or barbecue kebab sticks, due to the sharpened ends. Tara has shown no ill effects, I just find the poo a bit chunky!
