Category: Top Dog

I know this might be a simple fix, but please read all of this before judging.

Recently, I installed a camera to watch my dog while I'm gone. My dog is crate trained, but my current apartment does not have much room for her crate as she is a bigger dog and her behavior is the same whether in her crate or out of it. I've tried putting her crate back and it did not fix her behavior and I was worried she would injure herself if I kept it.

When she is alone, her behavior is one of 2 polar opposites. Sleeping the entire time, or pacing and occasionally chewing on my stuff. She has plenty of her own toys, but she will not touch them, food, or treats if I am not home. However, my stuff is fair game. I've watched her and it doesn't seem like shes trying to destroy my things, just that's what she would rather play with in the moment. She will occasionally bring me my things to play with when I'm at home but I'll take them from her so she knows they aren't toys. (Shes a retriever)

I always take her on walks before leaving and we sometimes go to the dog park to run around on nicer days. I can not find any pattern in which behavior she will exhibit while I'm gone.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hello!

I’ve recently went and picked up my dog again after two years from my parents house (I’ve been in training and different schools in the military and couldn’t have home.) Since I’ve dropped him off he’s been diagnosed with colitis and also gained 20 pounds. I’m looking into getting him back into a healthy weight and eating right.

The vet has prescribed him Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Adult Hydrolyzed Protein Small Breed Dry Dog Food. I’ve purchased this food but he refuses to eat it. My parents were boiling tilapia, cooking rice, and combining this with the dry food and feeding him this. I think this is a huge part on why he has gained so much weight and had flare ups with colitis.

Any tips on how I can transition him back to the dry food which was prescribed to him?

Thanks for taking a look at this. I have a classic working german shepard. Like most GSDs he was a high energy puppy. My wife and I started taking him to the park in the morning to play frisbee (his most favorite thing) and then after work, more park and frisbee.

He just turned three and is somewhat starting to slow down and have slightly less energy. We would like to move away from needing to going to the park twice a day, rain, shine, snow… always park. If he doesn't go, or we are slightly behind schedule his anxiety gets high.

Can we do something to change this? Is it simply giving him a new job, doing both jobs for awhile and then phasing out the park? Can we de-job/de-program him?

I appreciate any and all help.

Alright we need some help. My fiances 5.5 year old Australian shepherd has been going through the garbages. Things we have tried:

• all garbages have lids
• all garbages that do not have a lock now have a child lock
• general supervision
• we are now onto increasing his play time with mind games etc but see below for added information

This is a new thing as of the last 4 months. Before now he has never been a problem – even with open garbage cans. But for some reason he is now going through the trash and unfortunately he's gotten food out and has rewarded himself. Does anyone have any way of training him out of this? We are going to give him more interaction and play/walk time but based on his behavior I think this is just something he is going to do now. We've done a day of intense play and he still went for the garbage. He gets fed with a puzzle for all meals as well.

Before anyone suggests it – we are not going to change what we put in the garbage or leave one out of his reach in the garage etc. We both have ADHD and it's just not sustainable – we are already struggling to remember to latch the damn child locks because when we turn our backs for 30 seconds he'll be in there if he thinks he can get away with it fast enough. Also – yes the child locks work but he is still able to get whatever is on the top because the lock allows maybe an inch of movement on one side and he's figured out he can move the garbage can away from the wall in order to exploit this.

Please help. I get the feeling even if we kept child locks on all the time he's going to start getting into other crap and I'm honestly worried for his safety. I know it's not an IF he gets something dangerous it's a WHEN. Unless we have our eyes on him 24/7 he's untrustworthy and that is so unsustainable 😞

We have a 12 week old goldendoodle male pup who we’ve had for 6 days now.

He is a very smart dog, but the main thing we’re struggling on is this fixation or tunnel vision he gets when we approach another dog or human. It’s worse with dogs though. He will stop and stare at them, essentially becoming a dead weight so I can’t tug on the lead to make him keep walking.

It’s clear he wants to join in with dogs who are playing with balls off lead, as he will jump and bark and cry. I also struggle to move him on from these situations too.

Can anyone suggest anything to help?

Hi everyone! I'm truly at a loss of how to proceed so hoping I can get guidance from this group. I have an almost 2 year old lab/brittany mix who is truly an sweetheart. However, he has a really destructive tendency and I don't know how to manage it or when it will stop. It started with him destroying things while I left him at home, so now I leave him in the crate any time I leave the house. So that solved that problem. But today, while I was working from home, I was in a few meetings and in that time, he completely chewed up my shoe. Is the only solution to crate him unless I have eyes on him? When will this behavior change – is it due to his age? TIA!

My four month old sheltie is great. Me, not so great as a trainer. We have been taking classes and she knows how to sit, but she sits at at least 2 feet away from me. She doesn’t respond well to luring with food, she either gets so excited with a great treat that she starts jumping, or she just won’t move toward me. She is very affectionate, but she much prefers me to sit on the ground and then she sits on my lap. Can someone give me a technique to get her to come closer to me so that eventually I can teach her to stand by me when asked. I’m careful to only give positive feedback to her.

We close our dog into the main bedroom with us at night (I'll explain more on that history below), and he goes to the bedroom door and loudly huffs at it until someone lets him outside. Once outside, he uses (maybe pretend to use, I can't see) the bathroom and then comes inside. He will then seem to settle down for 1-3 hours and then start the cycle all over again.

We got our dog as a 1 year old. He was an outside barn dog.

When we got our dog we were in an apartment, so we had a pee pad and he had full reign of the house at night. He picked up potty training on the pee pad quickly. He still didn't let us sleep, but it was because he barked at every noise in the hallway.

We moved into a house and started potty training to go outside. He did really well alerting us during the day by standing at the door and looking at us. He alerts us to go outside every 2-3 hours during the day, but can hold it up to 6 hours if we are gone. If we take too long to get to him he whines (rarely happens) but at night he didn't do any alerting that we could see/hear and it would lead to accidents all over the house.

We started closing him into the bedroom with us. The alerting started being more audible- huffing and whining. We will always get up, take him outside (no stopping at the food bowl or playing with toys) and bring him right back to bed.

Vet said everything looks good, and there's no physical reason he should be using the bathroom every 1-3 hours.

Trainer said that hes just a stubborn teenage dog and he will grow out of it. But he's 4 now and it's not helping.

I'm clearly missing something or not filling a need that he has, but I don't know what it is. This is my first dog and I'm still learning. Please help, the lack of sleep is really getting to me.