sigmachi1855
New member
My girlfriend and I have a wonderful, 6-month-old Newfoundland puppy. She is extremely well behaved aside from two annoying and potentially dangerous habits.
The most severe issue is her obsession with eating sticks. She always had a propensity to go after sticks while outside, but we never thought much of it since she never ate them. That is, until she lost her puppy teeth. Now she crunches through them in seconds and chews them up and swallows. When we are on walks, she has laser focus and snaps them up quicker than we can see them. We try our hardest to use the "leave it" and "drop it" commands, which she is normally very good with, but neither are working. When those fail, we result to trying to pry them from her jaws or pull them away from her. This is pretty ineffective because she is so quick and strong. I can tell that eating them definitely isn't playful and when we try to grab them, it isn't a game to her. However, she never growls or snaps at us. She only tries to hold on and eat them as quickly as possible. This happens at all times of the day, even right after she eats.
Aside from making walks exceedingly difficult, we also find a lot of sticks in her poop and she throws up sticks about once a week (after eating a larger amount than normal). I also know that this can be dangerous to her health, potentially causing infected splinters and bowel obstructions. Please help us figure out how to deal with this! We've been training her solely using clicker and positive reinforcement, but nothing seems to work with this.
The second issue is counter surfing. Since discovering her size, she has occasionally jumped up on the counters to check out what's up there. We were very careful to always keep anything out of her reach, but recently she was able to find food on a couple of occasions. Now, whenever she is in the kitchen, she's constantly hopping up onto the counter to see what's up there, even when nothing is. We have been trying to train it out of her by keeping the counters clean, using the "off" command with a treat when successful, and lifting her off the counters when she isn't listening (with praise once on the ground). Are we handling this correctly? This is starting to become a nuisance and it is embarrassing when we are guests in someone's home.
Thank you for any advice!
Here's our little monster at the beach today:
The most severe issue is her obsession with eating sticks. She always had a propensity to go after sticks while outside, but we never thought much of it since she never ate them. That is, until she lost her puppy teeth. Now she crunches through them in seconds and chews them up and swallows. When we are on walks, she has laser focus and snaps them up quicker than we can see them. We try our hardest to use the "leave it" and "drop it" commands, which she is normally very good with, but neither are working. When those fail, we result to trying to pry them from her jaws or pull them away from her. This is pretty ineffective because she is so quick and strong. I can tell that eating them definitely isn't playful and when we try to grab them, it isn't a game to her. However, she never growls or snaps at us. She only tries to hold on and eat them as quickly as possible. This happens at all times of the day, even right after she eats.
Aside from making walks exceedingly difficult, we also find a lot of sticks in her poop and she throws up sticks about once a week (after eating a larger amount than normal). I also know that this can be dangerous to her health, potentially causing infected splinters and bowel obstructions. Please help us figure out how to deal with this! We've been training her solely using clicker and positive reinforcement, but nothing seems to work with this.
The second issue is counter surfing. Since discovering her size, she has occasionally jumped up on the counters to check out what's up there. We were very careful to always keep anything out of her reach, but recently she was able to find food on a couple of occasions. Now, whenever she is in the kitchen, she's constantly hopping up onto the counter to see what's up there, even when nothing is. We have been trying to train it out of her by keeping the counters clean, using the "off" command with a treat when successful, and lifting her off the counters when she isn't listening (with praise once on the ground). Are we handling this correctly? This is starting to become a nuisance and it is embarrassing when we are guests in someone's home.
Thank you for any advice!
Here's our little monster at the beach today:
