Oh, Lord, she's a chewer

Her favorite napping place on the back of the couch, which she has not yet started to chew.

I went out on the back porch this evening to call the dogs in, and Riley was sitting on the stoop, looking tragic, as usual, and Rosie was chewing on the ash tree. The actual tree. Not a branch, or a stick--she was gnawing on the trunk, and she had chewed away a sizable piece of bark by the time I stopped her.

She's nearly seven months old now, and I figured all the aggravating puppy behaviors--chewing, biting, wolverining, peeing--would have been learned outta her by now. And it's true, she doesn't pee in the house (and she'd better not start again because we finally replaced the living room rug, which had been peed and pooped and died upon by the best dog in christiandom, Boscoe). And she is not a wolverine often, only when she's overly tired. But the chewing has suddenly increased dramatically in the last few weeks.

Why? She's done teething. But dogs, apparently, enter a second chewing phase right around seven months of age, and it can last for quite some time--up to six months. Gulp. So here's Rosie, right on schedule, chomping down vigorously on everything she can get her teeth around, including (this evening) Doug's thumb.

We try to keep her busy--long walks, agility training, dog park visits, endless rounds of tennis ball. But you can't walk into a room without treading upon splinters of chewed sticks or other gnawed bits of things that I don't recognize or didn't know we owned. The other night it was a piece of old picture wire. Where did it come from? Did she chew it off of a picture? Which picture?

Also: pens, dish towels (two of them now have holes in the middle), small mysterious bits of plastic, blankets, anything made of paper. Socks. An old pair of pajama bottoms that I was going to cut up as dustrags. The plastic handles from her car-carrier. And she has developed a real fondness for one of Doug's yellow work gloves--not work as in his job, but work as in the gloves he uses for hauling in firewood, or doing other manly tasks. And firewood, she chews on that, too; we have a couple of chunks in a holder by the fireplace and she will lie down and gnaw on them happily for as long as we let her.

Often when she is bored she'll grab a newspaper as she passes a table, just whisks it away without even breaking stride, and while you have to applaud that, you can't applaud what she does with it: she rips it to shreds in a matter of seconds. So along with the pieces of stick, shredded newsprint litters the downstairs. And like pieces of stick, shredded newspaper cannot be vacuumed but must be picked up by hand. Which is why it's still littering the downstairs.

But a tree!  Who would think to bite a tree?  This worries me. I have heard of dogs who chew their way through Sheetrock walls, and dogs who have destroyed a home's woodwork, and god help us that Rosie does not become one of those dogs. We keep waiting and waiting for the day when she is trustworthy enough to leave outside of her kennel while we're gone. This recent chewing resurgence tells me that day is not very close.

As I type, I can hear sounds of chewing coming from the living room. Shall I check? What do you think?

Oh, good girl! A Nylabone. This time.