With the holidays approaching, it’s a good time to think about protecting your dog from eating bad stuff — like tree ornaments and fruit cake.

Callie, just eleven months old yesterday, scares me, because she’ll eat just about anything. When she plays soccer, she takes advantage of every opportunity to eat a little grass. This isn’t really terrible, but it’s symptomatic. Same thing when we walk near the golf course; if there’s a divot around, Callie will take a stab at it. This could be more serious because of the fertilizers used to enrich the grass. So far, we’ve kept her from eating anything really horrible, but we worry about it. The other day, she ate a hamburger-sized piece of an exotic rug. She’s also tried to eat a few of her favorite toys recently — although she continues to spare her most favored “stinky” and a few other special toys. Here’s Callie with her “stinky,” a favorite security object that she is careful not to damage.

Not all dogs are so fortunate. Here’s an article about a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Disa who ate a ten-inch long tent peg. She’s OK, but what a nightmare. This article also talks about dogs eating fish hooks, condoms, bras, coins, socks, baby booties, and a sewing needle. Don’t these animals have any limits? Deefer, a bull mastiff, chewed through 20 pairs of underwear in 12 months.

It gets worse. Here’s a story, from the BBC, about Taffy, an 18-month-old springer spaniel who swallowed 40 pairs of pants, 300 socks and 15 pairs of shoes. It was the last pair of pants that caused Taffy to need some surgery, which, happily, was successful.

So much for dogs eating “stuff” they find around the house or out and about. What about food they find? There are some foods that can be dangerous to dogs, but some things — like chicken bones, turkey bones, chocolate, mistletoe, and poinsettia plants — are more likely to be around during the holidays.

Here’s an article from twodogpress.com about foods that can be hazardous, and even fatal, to dogs. Some of these, like onions, raisins, grapes, walnuts, and macadamia nuts sound pretty harmless, but even in small doses they can lethal for dogs.

So how do you deal with this? How do you stop your dog from eating all this junk?

Well, the first step is that you just can’t let your dog out of sight if there is truly lethal stuff around. You have to keep “man’s best friend” out of trouble. Also, you can try to dog-proof your house, just like you child-proof your house when there’s a small child around.

But you can also work with your dog on the “leave it” command. Here, from lockergnome.com, is a good article on how to teach your dog to “leave it.” “Leave it” means “don’t pick that up.” The article makes an interesting distinction between “leave it” and “no.” “No” means “stop — something is wrong.” But you don’t want your dog to stop every time you walk past something dangerous. Actually, you want to keep going and have your dog “leave it.” So “leave it” is better than “no.”

Our dogs are very special friends, and there’s nothing better than sharing experiences with them, helping them do the things they like to do, and nurturing their personalities. But there are also times when they depend on us in a very critical way to protect them from themselves.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under Callie, Dog Communication, Dog Talk, Relationships, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.