We adopted a golden retriever mix at 4 months old - she's 6 months now. We live on a farm and she gets long runs 2-3 times a day, plus daily 1-2 hour playdates with my mom's weimaraner. She is crated only when someone is not home, which isn't that much. She is a shoe eater and we've given her toys and bones like you wouldn't believe. She also eats the plaster off the walls (in a pretty big way, in 3 different rooms), and tries to eat (not lick - EAT) dishes, firewood, metal, coal, and furniture. But the very worst is the poo. Our chickens are free-range; she devours their poo. She goes to the barn and digs up every crumb of cat poo she can find. She eats deer poo on her walks. She eats horse poo at my mom's. I would bet she eats more poo than she does dogfood. We give her Iams puppy food and she appears to be beautifully healthy, gaining weight nicely. She comes in and tries to lick the kids with her disgusting poo lips. I think I've gotten to where I'm really freaking out on her, because even my 4-year-old tells me to relax. She knows she isn't supposed to do it - she is really sneaky about it, and when she's caught she takes off in the other direction. She also will sneak a shoe and devour it when we're close by, or sneak around the corner and dine on some tasty plaster walls.
This has been going on for 2 months with hardly any change in behavior, despite all of our redirection and substituting. I have turned into a crazy yelling person over this - not good. I have had several dogs from puppyhood and I've never seen anything like this.
Please give me some advice! I'm going nuts!





We lived in the country and he'd eat what he could find, including his own when it was frozen in the snow. Then, one day he came up to me with the WORST breath ever. And he had what looked like sand on his mouth. I figured out that he'd been eating cat poop out of the litter box!! He was so ashamed of himself but couldn't help it. All we could do was try to keep him away from the litter box and from any other "sources" available. It is gross, but I don't think it's harmful to them. He at a lot of other bad stuff along the way (he loved eating wood, I once had to pull a plastic bag out of his bum because he got into garbage somewhere and it was stuck on the exit route, he drank water from ponds and puddles, he'd eat at a dead animal if he could, etc. etc.) It sounds like we let him roam or something, but we didn't. Over 15 years he just managed to get into as much trouble as he could, leash or no leash (he was an escape artist too).
. We use cloth diapers and she devours the contents within seconds if I don't put it away right away (changing baby's shirt, etc, i don't obviously leave poopy diapers laying around). Sometimes I put a diaper by the bed and try to get baby settled before taking the diaper out of the room and BAM she eats it. Grosses the heck out of me, I tell you. I yell, she does know she's not supposed to do it. I also notice if the baby does some business she is hopefully sniffing around the leg openings of her onesie hoping for a way in. YUCK. Obviously it's easier for me to prevent it than for someone living in a country with free-range chickens, but still I'd like her to stop it, I also wonder why she does it and if she can get sick from it, the silly dog.
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