@iamkate Mine is still very much a “puppy”, and he’s about 1.4 years old. I have had dogs my whole life, and lived with up to 5 at a time. This GSD takes the cake, by a mile, when it comes to making trouble.
He is the most curious dog I’ve ever had, and he wants to destroy
everything. Yesterday he started playing with a 5-gallon bucket, and he easily carried it around, and eventually bit through the plastic, which is pretty tough. He used to bring me tools, like a 14mm box-end wrench. It’s a piece of solid steel, I can’t imagine what is “fun” about it. Then he found some rubber coated dumbbells, and started bringing me the smaller ones, and gradually upped the weight. I think that the biggest he has carried around was 10 lbs, and he wasn’t even a year old.
Every piece of furniture I have has been at least “tasted”, if not just completely ruined.
I basically quit my last job so that I could stay home with him all day (work from home), and when I’m in a meeting, he catches on that I can’t really “defend” the house/chair/sleeve/etc and he will attempt to destroy it. We go outside about 20x/day, and on long walks and hikes 2x per day. That will buy me about 3 hours of exhaustion, and probably let him sleep until 7:30am-ish, if I’m lucky.
He is crate trained, DNA-tested, veterinarian approved, healthy, spoiled with toys and gourmet foods, and I love him more than anything, but he has been my primary focus for over a year, and some days it is challenging.
One of the reasons he is so challenging for me, is because he isn’t food-motivated, at all. Some days I have to put him in his crate with his food, just to give him some time to “remember” that he’s hungry and needs to eat. Using food for training rewards is useless. I could have a raw steak in my hands, and he would be chasing a bee, completely ignoring me.
He’s 10/10 as far as “effort required to live with/train”. I’m hoping that “we” mature a little at age 2.
