[sprayeddog]

Matty is 9 months old now and he's still very much a handful ...

I talked about how Matty's a counter-surfer last time ... many posters have suggested the water bottle trick and we've done that, as well as isolate him (lock him up in the washroom) for a few minutes everytime we catch him doing it. Well, it hasn't really worked. Matty still jumps up to sniff / bite things from the counter top if there's food or anything that catches his attention on the counter top. The latest is he grabbed my wife's ipod from the counter top and left a few dents on it when I finally caught him chewing on it a few minutes later. At least the ipod still works ... .

Worse, we noticed he's been scratching the dry-walls as well. A few months back, when Matty was ~ 4 months old, we kept him in a fenced off area in the upstairs washroom during the daytime when we go to work. One day we came back we found that he's dug a hole on the washroom's drywall and that's when we got a crate for him. And it worked, for a while anyways. Over the past 2 weeks we notice a few scartch marks on the dry walls close to where his crate is. We crate him when we go to bed at night, and also when we go to work in the afternoon, and apparently when he's in the crate for long he keeps hitting the crate until he gets close to a dry wall, and starts scratching the wall with his paws through the crate.

I don't know how to tackle this one cos there isn't really an area in our house that is 1/ tiled (if we put the crate on hardwood floor or a carpeted area he'll destroy the carpet / hw floor underneath) and 2/ isn't reasonably close to a wall. Worse comes to worst I'll have to leave the crate in the unfinished basement which will be a last resort cos the basement is cold and dark.

We don't understand why he likes to scratch the wall. The wall is just a plain, flat wall - there's no smell or anything to it. And there are plenty of toys inside the crate as well.

And it's not like we don't exercise him ... we spend ~ 30 minutes to play with him inside the house in the morning, ~ 30 minutes after we get home from work at night, and walk him everyday.

My wife and I are getting pretty exhausted emotionally at this point ... Matty is a cute lab but he only behaves when we're A/ feeding him or B/ playing with him. We cannot possibly play with him 7/24. And when you're not playing with him, he can be very annoying, to downright destructive.

When we try to sit down and watch a TV show, we get interrupted every minute or so, because he'd be biting on the vaccum cleaner's hose, and when we correct him he'd go and bite the magazine, and when we tell him "No" he' go on to bark at us. We'd isolate him for a few minutes, let him back out, and he'll bite some DVD cases ... on and on and on. When we're upstairs he'd bite dirty laundry from the laundry basket and chew on it, you correct him, and the minute he gets back inside the room he goes right to the laundry basket again. After a few more times of correction, he'd bite my slippers for a change, or bite my wife's glasses. You correct him again, and he'd bark at us.

I don't believe we've done anything terribly wrong in the training process. Matty isn't our first dog but we haven't had so much trouble with any other dog (I've had a beagle, my wife's had a cocker spaniel and a german sheppard / collie mix). Never have we given in to his barking or his annoyance. We've never rewarded him for doing something wrong, and we've been as consistent and as assertive as we could be, while still being as kind and loving as possible after we've punished him.

Please tell me ...

1. Labs are energetic dogs but when they're fully grown they don't behave in this manner their entire life-span

2. Matty is potentially going through a 'rebellious' stage growing into an adult, which is only a temporary thing

3. We're not the only ones going through this, and as long as we're patient with him he'll eventually turn around.



Thanks,
SD