Why do dogs like to chew on bones and slippers?
Why Does My Dog Look Me Dead in the Eyes While Destroying My Favourite Slipper?
It started with a flip-flop.
Not just any flip-flop. My favourite one. The left one specifically, from a pair I'd had for three summers, broken in to exactly the right degree of comfortable. Gone in forty minutes while I was on a Zoom call. I came downstairs to find Biscuit sitting in the middle of the living room, surrounded by foam debris, looking extremely pleased with himself.
I wasn't even angry. I was just... confused.
He has toys. Good toys. A rope, a squeaky hedgehog, two different rubber balls. They were right there, untouched, three feet away from the crime scene.
Why the flip-flop?
I've been thinking about this question for longer than I'd like to admit. And the answer, as usual with dogs, turns out to be way more layered than "he's just being naughty."
Here's the first thing that reframed everything for me.
Chewing, for a dog, isn't destructive behaviour. It's not even misbehaviour in any meaningful sense. It's one of the most ancient, deeply wired things a dog can do. Their ancestors — wolves, wild canids — spent a significant portion of their waking lives chewing. Not just eating, but actually chewing. Working through bones, hide, cartilage, sinew. The kind of sustained, effortful gnawing that takes time and focus.
Modern dogs don't hunt. They don't have to work for their food. A bowl of kibble takes about 45 seconds to inhale. And then... what? Eight more hours of Wednesday afternoon?
The chewing instinct didn't go anywhere. It's still in there, completely intact, looking for somewhere to go. When Biscuit finds my flip-flop, he's not being malicious. He's just found an outlet for something that's been sitting in him all day with nowhere to land.
That's point one. Chewing is a need, not a choice.
But why bones specifically?
This one is almost embarrassingly straightforward once you know it.
Bones are the original chew toy. Literally. For tens of thousands of years, the reward at the end of a successful hunt was meat — but after the meat came the bone, and the bone kept giving. Marrow, cartilage, connective tissue. Nutritionally dense, satisfying to work through, and critically: it took time. A dog working through a large bone could be occupied for hours.
The brain learned to associate that sustained chewing effort with reward. With good things happening. With safety and fullness and everything being okay.
So when your dog gets a bone now — even a clean, dry, nothing-particularly-nutritious bone from the pet shop — some ancient part of their brain goes, yes, this is the thing, this is exactly the thing. The chewing motion itself triggers a release of endorphins. It's genuinely calming. Studies on dogs given chews before stressful events show measurably lower cortisol levels afterwards.
It's not that different from the way some people need to fidget, or doodle, or pace when they're anxious. The physical rhythm of the repeated motion does something to the nervous system. It settles things down.
Biscuit doesn't chew because he's bored and destructive. Biscuit chews because it makes him feel okay.
So why the slipper, then. Why not the rope toy.
This is the part that actually got me.
Dogs don't just want to chew something. They want to chew something that smells right. And smell, for a dog, is not a minor detail — it's basically the whole world.
Your slipper smells like you. Intensely, specifically, unmistakably you. Your skin cells, your sweat, your particular combination of whatever you've been in contact with all day. To Biscuit, that slipper is the most you-scented object in the house, possibly more so than the actual you, because the slipper has been marinating in foot contact for months.
When you leave — for work, for an errand, for a Zoom call upstairs — Biscuit doesn't fully understand where you've gone or when you're coming back. What he does have is your scent. And chewing something that smells strongly of you is, researchers believe, a self-soothing behaviour. It's proximity to you in the only form available.
I find this genuinely hard to sit with. He's not destroying your things out of spite or revenge (dogs don't really do revenge — that's a very human projection). He's doing the dog equivalent of holding something close because he misses you.
The flip-flop wasn't an attack. It was a hug.
A very destructive hug, yes. But still.
There's also the texture angle, which I didn't expect to care about but actually find fascinating.
Different dogs gravitate toward different chew textures, and it's not random. Softer materials — foam, rubber soles, the felted inside of a slipper — give under pressure in a satisfying way. There's resistance but not too much. For dogs who are anxious or under-stimulated, softer materials are easier to make progress on, which means the reward loop (chew → give → satisfying sensation → chew more) fires faster and more reliably.
Harder materials — actual bones, dense rubber toys, antlers — take longer to show progress, but they last longer and tend to be more calming for dogs who are already reasonably settled. More like meditation than like frantic stress relief.
The interesting implication here is that if your dog is consistently going for soft household items — shoes, cushions, the corner of the sofa — that's often a signal that they need more than just "a chew toy." They need the faster feedback loop, which means they're probably running at a higher baseline anxiety than you realise.
Biscuit, as it turns out, was going through a phase where I'd been working longer hours. He wasn't chewing because he was bored. He was chewing because he was managing something.
Puppies get their own paragraph because their situation is genuinely different.
Puppies chew everything because they are teething, full stop. Between roughly three and six months, their adult teeth are coming in and their gums hurt. Chewing provides counter-pressure that relieves the discomfort, the same way a human baby gnaws on a teething ring. The fact that the thing they're gnawing on is your dining chair leg is just an unfortunate detail of their access and opportunity.
Past the teething phase, though, puppy chewing transitions into the learned-behaviour version — the endorphin loop, the scent comfort, the anxiety management — which means the window to redirect it is actually quite short. If you don't establish early on what is and isn't an acceptable chew target, the habit calcifies fast.
This is why "he'll grow out of it" is only sometimes true. They grow out of the teething version. The anxiety and comfort version? That one needs more intentional work.
One thing I want to push back on, gently.
There's a version of the "dogs chew because they're bored" explanation that implies the solution is just more toys. Buy more toys, problem solved. And I believed this for an embarrassingly long time — hence the rope and the squeaky hedgehog sitting uselessly three feet from the flip-flop disaster.
The thing is, novel objects stop being novel very quickly. A new toy has maybe a few days of genuine interest before it becomes part of the furniture. What dogs actually need isn't more stuff to chew. It's more engagement in general — more sniffing opportunities on walks, more problem-solving, more of that mentally tiring kind of activity that makes them feel like they've actually done something with their day.
A dog who has had a genuinely stimulating morning — a long sniff-heavy walk, some training, some social interaction — is a dog who comes home and crashes out and doesn't particularly feel the need to self-medicate with your belongings.
A dog who has been home alone since 8am with three untouched rubber balls is going to find the slipper.
Every time.
I came downstairs after that Zoom call and looked at Biscuit sitting in the foam wreckage, and something shifted a bit.
He wasn't a bad dog. He wasn't being difficult, or spiteful, or stupid. He was a creature running ancient software on a life that looks nothing like what that software was designed for. No hunting. No pack. No sustained physical and mental effort across the day. Just a flat, a bowl of kibble, and the long quiet of a Tuesday.
And he found the thing that helped. He found the thing that smelled like me, and he worked on it, and it made him feel less like whatever the dog version of adrift is.
You can't really stay annoyed at that for long.
I bought him a better chew toy the next day. One of the long-lasting natural ones that takes actual effort to get through. And I started letting our morning walks go longer, less purposeful — more stopping, more sniffing, more of him just reading the world at his own pace.
The flip-flop situation has not repeated itself.
Probably because I now keep my shoes in the cupboard. But still. Progress.
if any of this landed — share it with the person in your life whose dog has also recently committed crimes against footwear. They deserve to feel understood.