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Showing posts with the label chew toys

12 Useful Tips for New Dog Owners to Avoid Common Raising Mistakes

12 Useful Tips for New Dog Owners to Avoid Common Raising Mistakes The first three hours are a blur. I remember the box was open and Biscuit stood in the doorway of our apartment and did not come in. I had read that dogs need a few days to decompress. That sounded reasonable at 2pm on a Saturday with a dog I'd never met. So I sat on the floor in the hallway and waited. He waited. We were both fairly certain we had misunderstood something about this. Three hours later he was on the couch, head on my foot, asleep. Nobody had told me what those three hours were actually for. That's the thing nobody tells you. Raising a dog well isn't a set of rules you memorize. It's about a hundred small decisions, most of which you make once, in the first weeks, and then live with for a decade. Get a few of them right and the next ten years get easier in ways you can't measure. Here are the twelve I'd give a friend on day one. Start With a Vet Visit Before You Start With a Traine...

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 be...