I know the entire family will eventually forget about the absolute chaos that crazy dog Camp is creating in our household at the moment but right now that little SOB is on thin ice. The house smells like pee, he has eaten hundreds of dollars in toys, shoes, and expensive maternity clothing and now he is starting to dig up the back and front yard, not to mention the complete mess he has made of the car. As I pondered his destructive behavior, I took solace in the fact that Camp in fact is not the worst pet ever, that title goes to my friends dog Shamus. Shamus bit my buddies girlfriend and ate the inside of truck. I'm not shitting you, the entire dashboard all the way down to the wiring. Can anyone top that?

Beagle.

I can't top that story!<br><br>I can't buy any new chairs or sofas until our two cats die. They shred the furniture because some

Amen! I'm so tired of the sound of cat wretching at 5 am!! If he'd just puke on the linoleum, I'd be ok... but no, gotta go find some carpet, the lil chit.<br><br>Our 3 are all declawed (front only)... wouldn't have a cat any other way. Sorry opponents.<br><br>If the puker didn't snuggle up and sleep ON me, EVERY night... he'd be a frkn rug by now. The others at least stay outta of the way most of the time.<br><br>I did always hate my brothers various dogs over the years... every single one would get so excited when I'd come over, they'd jump and fidget and wiggle... and piss all over me! Grrrr...

And that pretty much sums up cats, doesn't it??? They know EXACTLY which buttons to push, and how far to push you, and then they pull you right back in with all of their snuggles. Damn! It's a fine line between love and hate!

Don't know that I can top it, in terms of sheer destruction, but I once had an Australian Cattle Dog/Australian Sheppard mix that I almost returned to the kennel because it was smarter than I was.<br><br>I was in the service at the time living in an apartment -- in hindsight, it wasn't the best choice of a dog for the living environment. Anyhoo!<br><br>I leave at 5 am and secure the dog in one of those metal travel crates that they use for show dogs. Now picture this, the crate is tucked into a corner of my apartment so two walls of the crate are flush to the walls of the apartment. I get back to my place 90 min later, the dog's sitting on the couch making a meal of one of the cushions! The joker figured out that if you pull on the end wall of the crate hard enough from the inside, eventually it caves in on you. You crawl out from under it and voila freedom.<br><br>So I clean up the mess, put him back in the crate and I wrap a bungee cord around the top seam where the front wall and roof of the crate meet. I've got him. Leave for work, come back at lunch and the dog is sitting in the living room eating through my CD collection. He actually chewed through the bungee cord and then pulled the wall in again.<br><br>All right fine. I take the metal S-hooks off the ends of the now destroyed bungee cord and wrap those around the seams again with a pair of pliers. Crate him up, off to work. Good to go. There's no WAY he escapes that.<br><br>I come home at the end of the work day he's out again! He realized what I failed to. The back wall of the crate had the same vulnerability as the front. I never even considered it since that end was up against the wall.<br><br>I clipped a couple of D-rings around those and eventually won the war, but damn for a while there, I was seriously questioning who was going to be the Alpha male.

Did he ever learn math?

He mastered Algebra, but Trigonometry got the better of him.

As for the chewing I had great luck with Bitter Apple spray (easily obtained from your local pet store) to keep my dog from chewing up things we wanted left in one piece, but it sounds like you may need a tanker truck full of the stuff to address your needs. We did not have kids when our Aussie mix mutt Enzo was a pup, but he is a dog toy destroying machine.<br>Their full disassembly usually takes under 2 min. There will be many tears shed over stuffed animals in the future I fear as our son is due in nine days and the dog has been seen eyeballing some of the toys in the nursery already. Anyone have experience convincing their dog that kid toys are not dog toys?

n fairness to the dog, I think we confuse them a bit. My wife and kids tend to buy cute fury chew toys for the pup that look very similar to the kids stuffed animals. I'm sure Camp is thinking I don't get it, I get pounded for chewing on the bear but they wave this freaking rabbit around in my face, humans are nuts. I try to convince Liz to buy only pig ears but she refuses because they are disgusting, her words not mine.

We have a Aussie as well but he loves the bitter apple, licks it right off whatever you spray it on.<br>When he was about a year old he would take the plastic tube that has the spring in it for the toilet paper holder and destroy it. We would come home to find the tube in little peices and the spring stretched out. I still haven't figured out how he stretched the spring by himself. We got him out of this by using the cream you get from the vet to keep them from licking their stitches. This would only work on hard items though.<br><br>As for him eyeballing the baby toys. We decided to try buying only rattling toys for our son and squeaky ones for the dog. Some of the baby ones do squeak and when play with those the dog comes running. He's 6 now and listens pretty good when you tell him No, that's the babys toy.

We used a similar concept with our current dog. No squeaking toys for babies, those were the dog's domain. The funny part was watching my wife trying to perform squeaker-ectomies on any gifts that family bought, if they didn't know or forgot the house rules.<br><br>The rule worked pretty well. However, when my first child was born, the dog was already an adult and pretty calm, so he was pretty mellow about which things belonged to whom.

Sounds like you need a visit from Cesar Millan.<br>www.cesarmillaninc.com/<br><br>or at least his dog training DVD's www.cesarmillaninc.com/products/giftpacks.php<br>He is also on the TeeVee... check your local listings. =-)

This came across my Google Reader today and I thought about y'all. Enjoy!<br>failblog.org/2009/03/11/puppy-training-fail/

That's great, I'm there. thanks Rob,