Our Catahoula Leopard Dog is a cheap date. She recently turned one year old and we’ve had her since she was a puppy, so we’ve been through the puppy chewing phase with her. Whereas our other dog needed heavy duty rawhides to keep her teeth busy, and they never kept her teeth busy long enough, our Catahoula pup has never needed a rawhide to chew on. She prefers pine cones and pine straw that she finds in our backyard. Pine straws are needles from long-needled pine trees that are commonly bought in bales and used as garden mulch.

From her earliest days our Catahoula puppy would smuggle things in from outdoors, tucked inside her cheek like a hoarding hamster. You wouldn’t even realize she had smuggled something until she started chewing on it. Pine cones, pine straw, and rocks were commonly smuggled items. We immediately took the rocks away.

Her favorite dog chew was a piece of pine straw. I kid you not, one single piece of pine straw that had fallen from our long-needled pine tree could keep our Catahoula dog busy chewing for three straight days. Talk about a cheap date!

After the serious business of keeping our Australian Cattle Dog/Husky mix (Ausky) busy with dog chewies, and retraining her not to chew up our house, we were prepared to use the same techniques in training our Catahoula puppy. Our Ausky dog had come to us as a semi-adult shelter dog with a lot of problems. We were successful in retraining her to be able to have full run of the house even when we weren’t home, without worrying about dog chewing or potty in the house. We shared her story and how we retrained her in the book Bad Dog to Best Friend which is available on Amazon.com.

After adopting the Catahoula puppy, we studied up on the Catahoula Leopard Dog breed and according to everything we read, serious training was a must for the Catahoula breed, as well as being ready to deal with dog chewing issues. We were totally ready, but our Catahoula puppy didn’t follow the chewing regime that our Ausky dog had gone through. A single piece of pine straw and she was perfectly happy, trotting around like a man with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth. That’s exactly what she reminded us of, too. Just like a person who chews on toothpicks, our Catahoula dog chews on pine straw.

Pine cones were another big dog treat in her life, though we did not accommodate them as readily as the pine straw. Our Catahoula dog didn’t actually eat the pine cones, she simply chewed them into little pieces making quite a mess in a short period of time. Pine cones and pine straw were cheap treats that our yard had in abundance, and it was preferable to allowing her to ingest large quantities of rawhide which can harm your dog. If a dog gets too much rawhide in their belly it can swell up and block their intestines. Dogs can die from intestinal blockage and our Ausky dog had given us a few scares during her chewing phase, so it was a relief not to have to worry about such things.

We were lucky that we never had to worry about our Catahoula puppy actually swallowing the pine cones. If a dog swallows anything big and chunky it can cause choking or an intestinal blockage. Allowing your dog to chew on pine cones from outdoors could also tempt them to chew on decorative pine cones in your home that may have been treated with chemicals that are toxic to your dog.

In addition, dogs eating quantities of pine cones and pine needles from outdoors can cause other issues. One concerns toxins that you use in your yard such as fertilizers, weed killers and insecticides. As we rarely use these in the backyard where our dogs play, this is not an issue for us. Pine tree oils and saps, however, can be problematic.

According to the ASPCA, Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) can produce vomiting, depression, pale mucous membranes and a drop in body temperature in cats, and possibly similar problems in dogs (though their site is a bit fuzzy on whether the dog symptoms would be the same as the cat symptoms.) The Buddhist Pine (Podocarpus macrophylla), which is also known as a Japanese Yew or Southern Yew, can cause severe diarrhea and vomiting.

Oddly enough, the ASPCA recommends using shredded pine as a mulch rather than the HIGHLY toxic cocoa bean shells, which contain the chocolate ingredient that can kill a dog in high enough quantities. Instead of using cocoa shell mulch, they recommend “non-toxic alternatives” including shredded pine, cedar or hemlock bark. They do advise you to keep an eye on your dog near mulch of any kind, however.

Christmas tree varieties of pines contain pine sap and oils that can cause gastrointestinal irritation and affect the nervous system if ingested in large enough quantities. In addition, the needles (presumably of the short-needled variety though they did not specify) can cause damage to the soft tissues of the mouth and gastrointestinal tract.

As our Catahoula dog doesn’t actually ingest the pine cones or the pine straw, I do allow her to chew on them, though pine cones are not allowed in the house. Ever since I banned her from bringing pine cones indoors she has lost interest in them. The pine straw, however, remains a favorite treat for our dog to chew on and considering the dangers of some of the alternatives, we’re more than happy to allow the pine straw.

Dog humor on t-shirts, hats, coffee mugs and beer mugs, tote bags,
posters and more! Our Catahoula Leopard Dog and our Australian Cattle Dog/Husky mix are both featured on a wide variety of gift items.

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Category: Dog Tails of Adventure

For those of you who don’t want the full book Bad Dog to Best Friend, we’ve excerpted the three chapters that will help you train your dog to be home alone, and released them as a Kindle booklet called “Training Your Dog to be Home Alone.”

Chapters include:

Potty Training a Problem Dog
Dealing With Dog Chewing Problems
Training Your Dog to be Home Alone

The booklet Training Your Dog to be Home Alone is available on Amazon Kindle for $1.99.

Tags: bad dog, bad dogs, books on dog training, dog, dog book, dog chewing, dog home alone, dog pee, dog peeing in the house, dog pees, dog pees in the house, dog potties in the house, dog training book, dogs, excited pee, kindle, kindle book, kindle release, nervous pee, new kindle release, potty train a dog, potty train an adult dog, potty training a dog, potty training an adult dog, sharon delarose, shelter dog, stress pee, teaching your dog to be home alone, train a bad dog, train a shelter dog, train an adult dog, training a bad dog, training a dog to be home alone, training a shelter dog, training an adult dog, weaning a dog from a crate, weaning your dog from a crate

Category: Book News

Dakota had been progressing. From her early days with us as the most godawful dog imagineable, she had reached a place where she brought us joy and laughter rather than work and frustration.

She’d come a long way from her early days of peeing all over the house, chewing, picking on our other dog, and taking off for the wild blue yonders when outdoors. Dakota is a rescue dog that we adopted from the dog pound when she was seven months old and she was a handful. It took a lot of hard work and dedication to train her. I don’t think many would have committed to Dakota the way we did.

But after two years of hard work, Dakota brought laughter into the house instead of Don’t Kill The Dog sticky notes. Most of her problems had been solved and the ones we were still working on were livable. She was a happy dog. She was also a very strong willed dog, due in part to her lack of early training and in part to her breed which required her to be independent and able to make decisions on her own.

Our other dog, Gypsy Rose, passed away at fifteen years old. We had spent two years intervening between Dakota and Gypsy Rose, one being young and full of spunk and the other being elderly and fragile with age. Dakota tormented Gypsy Rose any chance she got and I never left them unsupervised together, making sure to assert my pack dominance into the fray to make sure Gypsy Rose’s last years were peaceful.

Dakota surprised us by not sniffing around for Gypsy Rose after her passing. Dakota showed no signs of missing her, looking for her, or caring that she was gone. Dakota now had our full attention and she was loving it. She wasn’t designed to be a dog who shared attention. Her competitor was gone and she was happy for about two weeks until she unexpectedly reverted to some of her earlier bad behavior. She’d been doing so well, why was she suddenly being bad?

I’d let her out for potty and she wouldn’t come back in. At first she’d linger just a little longer than usual, then longer and longer until she simply refused to come when called, pointedly blowing me off with her body language. Things came to a head one morning when I was late for work because she decided to gallivant for 45 minutes and I had to revisit some of the training methods I’d used to deal with it before. But the question haunted me… why was she acting up? Why was she suddenly being such a bratty dog? I’d been so proud of her and the progress she’d made with us and now here she was being awful again. Why?

Then it hit me. We’d lost a pack member, a senior member of the pack who’d been in the pack for many years before Dakota joined us. This was Dakota’s perfect opportunity to challenge for Pack Leader and that’s exactly what she was doing. She was challenging me for the role of Leader of the Pack.

Tags: alpha dog, alpha dog challenge, boss dog, challenge for alpha dog, dog chewing, dog not listening, dog training, leader of the pack, pack leader, potty training a dog, training a dog

Category: Dog Tails of Adventure