Dog Stipping Tree

[RocketGurl72]

My dog has recently starting stripping a tree in our backyard of its branches. This is a first. Does anyone have any suggestions. I spend lots of time outside with her playing and redirecting her attention and she was good for about a week and then proceeded to pull off more last night.

[hazelrunpack]

Is she young? Our dogs all are proven branch strippers, but they do seem to outgrow it. Our best defense was to supervise the dogs constantly when they had access to the trees and to put a small fence around the trees in question. We almost totally lost a river birch, but luckily it's one of those that you cut all the way to the ground and end up with new shoots--it looked pretty bushy for a while, but now is a 5-stalker that's promising to be quite pretty. The dogs did a real number on the arbor vitae, though and the juniper looks like it's been nibbled by deer, when in fact, it actually was our flock of English setters...sigh.

Patience and redirection, with constant supervision does work, though. And with luck your girl will outgrow the urge, too

[RocketGurl72]

Originally Posted by hazelrunpack

Is she young? Our dogs all are proven branch strippers, but they do seem to outgrow it. Our best defense was to supervise the dogs constantly when they had access to the trees and to put a small fence around the trees in question. ...
Patience and redirection, with constant supervision does work, though. And with luck your girl will outgrow the urge, too

Thank you - I am going to put up a little fence around the tree and see how that goes. Our dog is approx. 18 months old. She is a rescued dog that we've had for just over a month now.

Someone else had recommended spraying the tree with a product called "Bitter End". Anyone with experience with the product?

[hazelrunpack]

If it's a bitter apple product, it's hit or miss. It's worth a try, but only about half our dogs avoid it--the other half seem to think it's got a wonderful taste!

18 months is about when our last rescue started finding trees attractive. He's 4 now and the behavior has just about extinguished itself.

[Longblades]

One of our girls did that with a birch tree. She found it highly entertaining to strip the "paper" off. Bitter apple worked for her. Vinegar might do the trick too. Or it might not. "Oh boy, thanks Mom, you made birch bark pickles for me, Yummm." LOL

[kitona]

Dish soap works like a hot dang as a chew preventative. Of course, things might get a bit foamy during a rain.

[Goldfields]

What sort of tree is it? Our sheltie pack do an annual prune of my weeping mulberry tree when it is starting to fruit up, they break it off at their head height like sheep will do to trees in their paddock. LOL. I don't mind, it always grows back and there must be something in the soft branches that they like or need. I do keep low tree guards around trees that I think aren't as hardy.