If you suspect that your cuties pica issue is somehow an emotional issue, whether stress, frustration, anxiety or boredom, curb the behavior by making some key changes in his lifestyle. Spend quality time with your doggie every day, whether you simply pet him and give him some much-needed TLC, play fetch or go on long walks outside with him. Attention and physical activity can go a long way in reducing these types of compulsive, undesirable actions, so make the effort.
As much as you may dote on your doggie, he may sometimes engage in behavior that is completely baffling. Although some dogs are indeed a little gluttonous, others take it even further by eating and chewing on inedible items, from wool sweaters to plastic bags and beyond — yikes.
If your pets pica isnt caused by any health ailments but you still cant manage to eliminate or reduce the behavior on your own, consult your vet regarding referrals to any qualified pet behavioral experts in your area. An expert may be able to give you useful advice on how to stop your dog from ruining all of your finest work outfits — think spraying yucky flavor deterrents on your closet doorknob, for example.
If you notice that your precious pet has developed a liking for eating clothing, then he is exhibiting classic “pica” behavior. Pica is a compulsive disorder that involves eating things that simply just arent edible, whether grass, blankets, wrapping paper, stones, electrical cords or wood. To put it mildly, dogs with pica arent exactly too picky about what they put into their mouths.
In cases of medically-induced pica, lifestyle changes will probably be ineffective. Take your dog to the veterinarian to figure out what condition may be leading to his desire to eat clothes, whether a gastrointestinal disease or nutritional issues.
Why is my dog chewing holes in blankets?
Dogs may chew on blankets for several reasons, including anxiety, teething (if the dog is a puppy), hunger, or attempting to fulfill a need to nurse leftover from their puppyhood. Blanket chewing is a common behavior and can be stopped by providing appropriate alternatives for your dog to chew on.
Using the Functional Medicine Framework to Help Solve PICA and Coprophagia
Lets use the Framework to help understand and offer solutions to this issue. We will discuss what you can do on your own and when you may need the help from a pet health practitioner.
This area is proving to be the biggest determining factor in health. And fortunately, it is an area that we may be able to do on our own without the need for a pet health practitioner. As a result, start here to see if you can fix PICA/Coprophagia issues.
We recommend you use the following scale, which ranks dog food in order from healthiest to least or unhealthy. Move your dog up levels as far as you can to the top level to improve their diet to see if that solves the issue. This scale is from our resource guide, How to Make Healthy Food Choices For Your Dog, a 40-page document that we researched, wrote and keep updated about how to make healthy food choices for your dog. We also include the text directly from the resource guide adding some explanations about the items in this scale.
How to Prevent Your Dog From Chewing Your Clothes and Furniture
The original content for this post is below, followed by a major addition we made to update new research and learnings we have come across to help dog owners address this issue.
For most of us, it’s hard to understand why dogs would eat things like rocks, socks or other non-food items. Yet many dogs do. The technical term is PICA. For some, it can result in a hefty vet bill when something dangerous is ingested and needs to be surgically removed.
In evaluating the behavior, we look at what is being eaten and under what circumstances. If the dog is eating rocks or dirt, it is possible the dog is looking to fulfill a nutritional deficiency. A visit to your vet might be worthwhile as well as evaluating your food choices.
If your dog is eating non-food items, look at how the behavior developed and when it’s happening. For example, a dog might start out by finding and playing with or chewing socks, pillows, and anything else around home that looks fun. For some dogs, it is merely an attempt to explore their world – which dogs do primarily through their noses and their mouths. Looking to have some fun or alleviate boredom is a common issue. Some dogs express this through chewing. Some dogs will chew lots of things but not ingest. Others will ingest the items they chew.
In other cases, the dogs end up swallowing items in an attempt to maintain possession if people are constantly taking things away. The attempt to maintain control can display itself in a game of keep away or tug of war. In other dogs, resource guarding will develop and a dog might growl, snap or even bite. And for some dogs, they will swallow the item to prevent someone from taking it away.
One client has a dog who was swallowing socks. While it most likely started out as something fun to play with and chew, she began swallowing them in an effort to keep them from being taken away. The original behavior probably started due to a bit of boredom, but it turned into a resource guarding issue being expressed by swallowing the item.
Another client has a dog who is eating rocks. In our discussion, we determined the rock eating appears to be due primarily to boredom. The dog is looking for something to do, and most likely started out playing with the rocks, but now eats them. In this case, I think resource guarding also plays a part. This dog also has some food aggression issues, so resource guarding rocks is certainly a possibility.
In the case of both clients mentioned above, the approach is similar. First, prevention. Don’t allow the dogs to practice the unwanted (and dangerous) behavior while we’re working to change it.
Next, we work very hard on teaching a reliable “drop it” and “leave it”. Anytime I am working with a client on “drop it” or “leave it” I want to make sure we are making it fun and rewarding for the dog, but it is particularly important in these cases. If there is an element of possessiveness, we need to be careful about perpetuating this perception that we are always taking things away and never giving anything back. Providing worthwhile rewards in exchange for leaving or dropping the items they have is essential. Sounding like you are having fun and playing a game, not scolding or punishing the dog, is also necessary.
In addition, we work at replacing these behaviors with more constructive behaviors. If the dogs are getting enough physical exercise and mental stimulation in more constructive ways, they will begin to forget about eating non-food items. Some of these issues are easily resolved, while others will take quite a bit of work. But working to resolve these issues could save the lives of these dogs, so it’s well worth putting in the effort.
Otherwise, eating a little grass and dirt and a stick here and there perhaps isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Since we get a lot of traffic and comments to this post, we wanted to update it with research coupled with many things we have learned about dog health, and provide a roadmap for helping dog owners find and treat the root causes for why their dog may be engaging in this activity.
In medical terminology, the two broad areas we want to consider for issues related to this article are:
We will start by saying that this may not be an easy issue to solve for many dog owners. As we recommend in our summary, it can take persistent trial and error by the dog owner to start, followed by working with a dog health care practitioner if the issue is still not resolved.
The reason why this may be a difficult issue to solve is because it is merely the symptom manifesting from a deeper problem that could be coming from one or a number of different areas in a dog’s body. It is not something relatively simple like your dog limping on a back leg, which is generally confined to an issues in the foot, leg or back.