We have a 4mo border collie puppy. She is misbehaving (chewing, digging/scratching on inappropriate items) daily, usually around the same hour at night.
We think there's two different scenarios where she misbehaves:
1. We believe she sometimes behaves for our attention.
During these times, she would do the misbehaviour for a few seconds, pause and looks at us, then continue, then look at us, and repeat…
She likely learned that it gets our attention, since in the past, we have tried to redirect her attention with toys when she chews and digs inappropriately. After we think she is doing it for attention, we recently started to ignore her during these moments, but she would escalate her behavior since we are ignoring her. Often, she would get increasingly frustrated and then it would turn into zoomies.
2. However, there are other times where we just can’t figure out why she is misbehaving.
It doesn’t look like she is misbehaving for our attention because she doesn't pause and look at us during/after misbehaving. There are times when we would be giving her calm pets occasionally (giving her attention) while she is chewing on her chew toy, and then she would suddenly get up and misbehave.
We also don’t think it is because she is hungry (plus it’s usually a while after dinner time), because sometimes, we would be giving her treats occasionally while she is settled down and relaxing, but then she would suddenly get up and start misbehaving. We think that if she is hungry then she would stay down to continue getting treats instead of getting up misbehaving.
We also don't think she is under-exercised during these times, because if we tried to play with her, she would be snappy, she would no longer chase the toy enthusiastically, or she would no longer bring the toy back to us but would lie down away from us instead and chew on it. This is often also at night time, after a day of various activities and training. We also don’t think she is mentally under-stimulated because if we try to train her, she would show signs of bad concentration.
We have tried to put her into her crate during these times to force her to sleep because we suspect that she might be over-tired, but she would throw a tantrum and chew on her bed and crate, or even have zoomies in the crate when she gets too frustrated that we are not letting her out of the crate. She does not have a fear of the crate or dislike for the crate because she sleeps in there fine overnight or when she is in the mood to nap during the day (sometimes she would even go into her crate herself to nap).
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We are wondering if anyone has any insights as to why she might be misbehaving, and how we should respond or teach her not to misbehave, or if we are doing something wrong (e.g. accidentally reinforcing her for her bad behaviours). We COULD just give her a kong to keep her distracted, but we’d like to figure out the root cause of the problem to make sure we are depriving her of her needs. Also if she is actually already super tired, we’re not sure it’s a good idea to give her a kong which would just make her even more tired.
