Category: Top Dog

I have a 4.5 month old Malinois who weighs about 26lbs. On Friday night she found a piece of cheese and ate the whole thing with the plastic wrapper still on it. She gobbled it so fast I couldn’t even react. She’s been acting totally normal-normal meals, normal play, normal Mal energy 🤪 I’m still so worried. I called the vet Saturday morning and they said just monitor for any changes. I have been meticulously and neurotically checking her poos and no trace of it yet, ugh!! I know she will get into things but the puppy stuff is scary 😓

We brought home a puppy a month and a half ago. My sweet, low maintenance adult dog died when I was expecting our first child, who is now 8 or so months. Puppy is 4 months. I’m home all day with both and handle most of the dog training and enrichment.

I made a mistake and left my puppy outside unattended for 30 mins and she destroyed something my husband had to fix. Now he’s saying he “understands why everyone said not to get a puppy with a baby”, all of his patience goes to the baby, and I need to train her better. She’s basically already potty trained and knows a lot of commands, but still is jumping up on things and tearing at them. She’s crate trained and does well around our baby (not triggered by baby noises, interacts well with him with supervision).

In my mind, she’s still a baby and his expectations are completely unrealistic. I grew up with dogs (this is my first young puppy) and of course his only direct experience with pet ownership was with a cat. He knows how important dog companionship is to me, especially after losing my dog while expecting.

Again, I am the one who handles the majority of dog and baby care during the week- he handles bills and home maintenance things.

I really don’t want to rehome as I would feel terrible, miss my pup and would worry about difficulties getting another dog in the future. We returned an adult shelter pet who wasn’t a great fit (aggression towards our child) after a day so I’d feel especially guilty doing so again. How do I help my husband have more patience with the puppy and convince him it’s worth it?

Please no “rehome the husband” type comments even though I understand the sentiment.

We have a two year old American Staffordshire terrier and she has responded well in most regards to treating her with a treat when she does good things.. but when we go out for walks she just wants to sniff and eat things off the ground.. I would really Iike for her to get over this behavior. She finds like chicken wing bones and weird things that I don't even see… I've tried taking treats with me and pulling her away and saying like leave it! Then giving her a treat but it's been like 2 years and she still eats stuff off the ground sometimes. I can say she does leave trash alone like paper and wrappers and stuff but if there is something food or some weird interesting thing she is going to eat it…her tummy gers upset easy. It would be better if she didn't eat stuff off the ground outside.. .. ..

We are doing around 2 hrs up, and 2 hrs nap. It’s pretty close to a routine with some changes just bc of everyday life. We always make sure he is potties and watered before nap. We nap him usually at set periods following the 2 on and 2 off or when he starts going haywire and biking ankles and not sitting still. We have an adult dog that he plays with almost all of his waking time, besides with us when we are playing with him or training him. We have entered week 4 and now he is not napping in his crate, protests for 10-30 mins when we put him in. Today he barely napped while we had him in his crate to which his behavior suffered greatly. Our 14 week old is teething and becomes very nippy when he does not nap. Apart from the all day play his older adult dog brother, at the end of the day, he started biting us very hard and not chewing on his toys. We give him frozen kongs and frozen carrots, but he continues to ignore all chew toys and go straight for our hands. He bites really hard. When he naps, he is very good puppy and does not bite and will let us train him and will independently chew on his own toys and play by himself. Is this normal sleep regression, teething discomfort?

Hi, I have a 4 month old mutt potentially a German shepherd, husky and standard poodle mix. He’s very sweet and smart, we had him for a month and he’s doing really good. He goes to the door to go outside for peeing and pooping. We put him in his crate at night and when we go to work these are both around 7 hours. He never pees or poops in his crate so we know he can hold it however when he’s not in his crate and we’re home he wants to go outside to pee very frequently sometimes every 10-15 minutes. What should we do? We know he can hold longer if he could and it’s great he’s going to the door and not peeing inside (he does if we don’t take him out when he goes to the door every 10 minutes 🤦🏻‍♀️) but how can we teach him how to hold it longer when he’s not in his crate too?