Dog Behavior: Destructive Dogs
[Music] [Applause] [Music] we’re talking about a problem that some of our dogs can have when they come into a new environment destructive behaviors is a common one that we see often times this is related to poor management in the home from the beginning like the dog hasn’t learned the rules we’ve seen people that have adopted a dog when they’ve gotten home from work and just throwing it in their house and went to dinner and then they’ve come home and the house is destroyed and they go I don’t know understand why this happened so a lot of this some of this type of behavior can it can be very preventable from the beginning if we just give our dog some time and we stay with our dogs and we manage their our dogs for those for that first little while when we adopt our dogs and bring them into our home they don’t understand the rules of their home we don’t know what the rules were in their previous home or if they had rules or you know where they had stayed or whatever so they don’t know that our rules are different you’re not allowed to chew on my couch you’re not allowed to chew up my furniture legs so so a lot of this kind of goes into some management a couple of things that the dogs really need one is they need something to do with their mouths dogs have to chew on something they just have to so we want to make sure that we occupy their mouths every dog has a different amount of energy and every dog has a different way of releasing that energy but the majority of dogs do like to chew on things we want to make sure that we’re giving them the opportunity to chew on the right things and and we’re managing the dogs so they’re not chewing on the wrong things and learning that those things can be fun did you want as well for me a lot of it goes into like in the house I want to have a couple of toys from my dog that my dog can play with by himself so anything that I play with like a tug toy or a frisbee or a tennis ball that kind of stuff is things that my dog interacts with me with we go out we play tug we go out we play frisbee we go out we play fetch and that’s those are games that my dog interacts with me with so I don’t leave those kind of toys out for my dog those kind of toys come out when it’s time for me to play with the dog and us to interact so those toys are always put away unless we’re playing with them and then I have a few other toys that can interact with with himself so there are plenty of toys that you know you can stuff food in you can do different things that the doll can really kind of entertain themselves with I put those toys out on the floor and I usually what I try to do is is have people rotate those toys so they might have three toys out in a given time and maybe a few days in they take those toys away and they put down three different toys and then later they’ll rotate those old toys back out but the point is that we want those toys to always be new you can see dogs all the time where they have a bucket load of toys next you know hanging out in the house and the dog walks past him every day and he’s looking for something new to do this is because dogs get bored very easy so we want to make sure that we keep that dog entertained so rotating the toys is a big one to help keep the dogs entertained hanging out with a dog in the house and allowing the dog to make those mistakes so if I’m hanging out in the house watching TV or whatever and I see my dog starting to look for something to do he wants to he’s sniffing around he’s getting excited he’s got his energy he’s doing the little zoom he’s around the house or something this is my opportunity to redirect the dog I say hey buddy here’s a toy and I throw that on the floor so one of the biggest problems that I see when it comes to working on some of these behaviors like like digging and potty training is when we tell people you want to interrupt the behavior we just mean interrupt it you know clap your hands make a little noise get the dog’s attention away from whatever he’s doing whether that’s partying on the floor or chewing on something he’s not supposed to we want to interrupt the behavior oftentimes people get very emotional about this and they yell at the dog right or they punish the dog and most of the time the dog doesn’t associate its behavior with that punishment what they do is they associate you with that behavior so they say I’m not gonna chew on the couch when you’re around because you get after me but when you’re not around like life is good right so or the same thing happens with with potty training and we end up having a bigger problem because now we have a dog that’s doing these behaviors and we can’t catch them to interrupt them and teach them the right behavior so the the biggest thing is try to keep the emotion out of it and the dog starts doing something we don’t want them to do chewing on something we don’t want them to chew on interrupt the behavior make some noise clap your hands whatever the dog stops doing the behavior and we show the dog the proper behavior that we want it to do same thing happens with potty training the dog starts to go potty I go hey hey hey he stops I go let’s go outside and we go outside and we go potty in the right area from so we just want to make sure that we we interrupt those behaviors we don’t scare the pants off the dog when we’re trying to show the dog the right things you know a lot of this is guidance and management so you know in management it’s not you know hey I’m gonna gonna punish you because you did something wrong the dog doesn’t know he’s doing something wrong the dog is just doing something that dogs do and we want to interrupt the dog and redirect the dog and show the dog the proper things that we want them to do so when it comes to chewing and destructive behaviors the majority of those are are just because a dog is bored dogs have a lot of energy they have a lot more energy than we have a lot of these guys were bred to work longer than we could so we want to make sure that you know it would be impossible for us to go out and walk the dog enough to make the dogs for most dogs to make them tired enough to where they’re they feel pretty satisfied throughout the day so we want to make sure that we’re giving the dogs a place for those energies we’re taking them out for walks we’re playing fetch with them we’re playing games with them and then we’re giving them things to do when we’re not able to provide that stuff we’re giving them something to chew on we’re giving them something something to do so most of the time this is what really helps with preventing any chewing behaviors and oftentimes stopping chewing behaviors when we get our dog into our home we want to just redirect the dog and show the dog the correct things to do to help manage that behavior and prevent him from chewing on things if we have a dog that’s already learned how to chew on some table legs and things like that and he thinks that’s a fun game we really have to watch him and manage that behavior you can do some things to help make those things less attractive to the dog like using they have lots of spray different kinds of sprays every dog is different some dogs don’t care about this spray if he doesn’t care about this bred you got to try a different brand and we want to just kind of make that access to those things unavailable and give him the good things that we want him to do make those more available [Music] [Music]
