He doesn’t hurt me at all, just likes placing my arm in his mouth. It seems to make him very happy. Anyone else experienced this?
Can I ask if you have any tips for this? Before this, I hadn’t heard anything from anyone with a similar problem like ours. My goodest boy is a 9 month old Portuguese Water Dog and he recently decided that the floor boards and every single one of my daughters’ Barbies weren’t enough to destroy and began removing the carpet for us.
He’s so smart and seems to be very empathetic when he’s not in destruction mode, but the constant destruction of things is putting a knot in what is an otherwise beautiful relationship right now. We’ve trained leave-it and settle down, but he’ll still grab things and if he’s left alone in his safe room he’ll find ways to make it unsafe.
Unfortunately I’m not trained in training… but what I can tell you is that immediate, positive reinforcement is far more effective than negative. Their doggy brains struggle to connect the events so they understand we’re angry, but not why.
Prob teaching granny to suck eggs but I would get him a large collection of chewable toys (which he’ll likely wreck disturbingly quickly), when you catch him chewing something he shouldn’t tell him sternly “NO, BAD DOG”, give him one of his chews, then when he starts chewing that praise enthusiastically / give a treat. He’ll quickly associate chewing his own toys with expected, praised behaviour and chewing non-toys with bad behaviour. Try to be as consistent as possible; I taught my mum’s dog lots of tricks / behaviours through constant repetition. Conversely, all the good work I did with my sister’s dog was undone immediately by her knobhead ex; consistency and behavioural modification ‘in the moment’ rather than after is key (imo)
