Search the Community

Hi everyone. I just wanted to say first that I am so thankful for the insights offered here constantly. Reading other people's issues and solutions really helps me to put Jax's behaviour into perspective and helps me to be thankful for the things he is good at that not every pup is. Thanks to everyone's previous help, Jax settled beautifully for day naps and now self-settles at about 9/9:30 almost every night. He also sleeps in the living room without us, which behaviour he led himself and he's very relaxed with it. His barking is better and he has stopped getting so overstimulated. We have two problems I could use help with, one more urgently than the other. He has discovered the wonders of humping in the last 3-4 weeks: dog, person, and inanimate. 95% of the time he will listen to me and leave a person alone when we are walking, but the 5% that he sees someone he 'likes', if he is allowed to (it goes without saying I remove him from the situation immediately if he does) he is completely focused on humping and is quite rambunctious about it. He has to be taken away because he will not calm. If it's in the house he has to stay in another room the entire time that person is there. Humping dogs is our real issue, though. He has very, very good recall, and I was confident in having him off lead for our very rural walks before this, but now he is on lead at all times. Around known dogs he is allowed to play, but with stranger's dogs I stopped allowing free play, as there was one occasion when he started to play hump another dog and quickly became manically overstimulated and they had to be physically separated and I felt he was distressing the other dog. I wanted to keep allowing greeting, but recently he has tried to hump other dogs during greeting and they have been let's say, pee'd off by this, but he doesn't moderate behaviour, and so we have stopped allowing greetings so as not to put other dogs in this position, which feels awful for his development. I need to know how to move forward with this, but I don't know where to start. His bed is a real issue now for this. I tried to let him work it out himself at first -- new hormones to get used to, teenage stuff, and all that. But he can't really hump it, he just flips it over and over and quickly becomes frustrated so he progresses to trying to rip it, and he rips things -so fast-. I then tried requesting "leave it", which worked the first week, then quickly escalated to him leaving the bed for shorter and shorter periods (even though leave with other things remains successful). Now I remove the bed from the room the first time he starts to fuss with it, and only bring it back in when he has calmed down, but it's at the point where I take the bed away within a minute of bringing it back. At night I have to wait for him to fall asleep on the floor or chair before I can reinstate the bed otherwise I'm worried he'll just have to sleep on the floor all night or shred the bed. Speaking of destruction -- I feel this is where I'm totally lost. He has started to destroy everything he can. There were a few months where he seemed to get that only toys were fair game but in the last few weeks he has destroyed countless objects and he now destroys the van when left alone for short periods. (We have a camper for work, he has always been more comfortable in that than left at home before now, and usually would mainly sleep or watch the world go by calmly) I left him yesterday morning for 30 minutes with a tripe filled bone (early when he is normally napping) and he chewed through a leather seat cover and a seat belt, leaving the tripe untouched. I did very nearly cry. I can't afford to replace these things and I need the seat belt. Already in the last week he's chewed through the dashboard plastic, the window opener, the rubber runner for the window, bits of the woodwork in the van... I took furniture out of the rooms we use because he started to annihilate anything that he could, so he just pressed his face to walls and chewed them, dug the carpet... We haven't changed routine in this time except he's now allowed longer walks, so I assume it's linked to his hormones, but I'm at the stage where I can't afford to replace the things he destroys and I'm out of options for where to leave him. I He's in the office with me today and we stop once an hour for 10 minutes to play tug or simple training and I treat him passively for relaxing or choosing his own toy/settling on the bed, but he will try to tear up bits of the floor even when he's right next to his favourite treat if I stop watching for more than a minute. He's on his lead now as I can't let him back in the van and he can't be left at home. I know these things are never a quick fix but I need to start doing something I feel will help as now I feel very helpless and it is definitely putting strain on my attitude to one-on-one puppy time which was up until recently a joy for me.