Dear Elwood, My dog is chewing up the furniture, digging up my garden and chasing cars.  How can I stop him?  Clueless and frustrated.

O Boy, you just named off about the three most common complaints that humans have about their canine companions.  You left out “not coming when called, jumping up on people and barking.”  But I’ wager your dog does these things too.

You see, almost all of those things are natural dog behaviors.  I know you humans don’t like it when we do them but we often just can’t help it.  It’s just in our nature.

Now the only one that is easy to train is to get us to come when called.  Now that is a normal behavior.  It works like this:  you say your dogs name and then feed him a yummy treat.  You need to do this 4-5 times in a row.  Then whenever you have an opportunity to call the dog to you when he or she is fairly close to you, call him to you and feed a treat.  Do this enough times and your dog will do what comes natural.  Boogie toward the food person. 

The reverse is also true.  If ever time you call your dogs name you do something unpleasant, like lock us in a crate or put is in a fence then we learn to go the other way when you call us.  And that’s just natural behavior too.  So remember – reward us with food or praise whenever we come to you and pretty soon we will just stay next to you about all of the time.

O.K. so we got coming when called taken care of.  So how do you get your dog to stop chewing, digging, and chasing cars?

Well the best way to get canines to stop doing something is to teach them to do something else.  You just won’t get nowhere much by punishing your canine friend when she does these things.  Like I said, the easiest thing to get your dog to do is to remain by your side.  So you can just extend that “come when called” to “stay with me.”

All dogs chew.  It brings us pleasure.  It probably releases endorphins in our brains.  You just watch the next time your dog really gets into chewing – kinda makes you jealous don’t it?  All those things you humans do, like smoke, drink, and eat just really ain’t very good for you.  I bet you wish you could get a good feeling from just chewing on something that ain’t harmful. 

And as far as we are concerned, everything is a potential chew toy.  So your job is to teach us what we can chew on.  Get three toys – then whenever you see us chewing on something you don’t want us to masticate, do the switcherooni trick and say “Don’t chew on that, here chew on this”  It really works!  And if your dog is just a real tough case, you might even have to crate him when you can't supervise - but give him his favorite chewy while in the crate.

When I learned it didn’t take much time at all for me to stop chewing on something as soon as I heard the word “Don’t”.   In fact I wrote a whole column on “chew toys” a while back and if you want I can email it to you. 

And as far as chasing cars is concerned there is only one safe way to go: BUILD A FENCE.  You can train your dog not to chase cars when you are present but once you are not around then it is our “job” to chase those big noisy beasts.  If you can’t build a fence, then keep us in the house unless you are with us and have us under control.

Digging is similar to chewing except digging is more like “work” to us.  We are just sure there is something down in there that we are supposed to git to and either kill it or bring it to you. “Jumping up” is a social canine behavior that most humans can’t help but reward even though they don’t realize it.

For now just start with “come when called”, then teach, “stay with me”.  Substitute chew toys for non-chew toys.  We’ll talk about digging and jumping up next time.  But it all boils down to rewarding the good behaviors and ignoring the bad ones. And guess what – it works on people too.

Till next time

Elwood