Destructive Chewing: Why Dogs Do It and How to Stop It

Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Why Your Dog Is Eating Your House (It's Not Revenge)

Let's get one thing out of the way right now, because I know it's probably sitting in the back of your mind every time you come home to a shredded throw pillow or a gnawed baseboard: your dog is not doing this to spite you. I know it feels personal. You've been gone for six hours, you walk in the door, and there's your favorite pair of shoes, destroyed, in the middle of the living room floor. The dog looks up at you with that mixture of guilt and confusion that we humans are so quick to interpret as "I know what I did." But that look isn't guilt. It's fear. It's the look of a dog who has learned that your arrival sometimes means raised voices and a finger pointed at a mess they don't understand they made.

Chewing is not an act of revenge. It's not a commentary on your parenting skills. It's not a power struggle, and it's not a sign that your dog is "bad." It is, first and foremost, a natural, biological, and deeply ingrained behavior that dogs do for a whole host of reasons. The problem isn't that your dog chews. The problem is that your dog is chewing on the wrong things, at the wrong times, and often because they're trying to tell you something that they can't put into words. Your job, over the course of this book,