Aren't adolescent dogs fun? Big dog body, baby brain, and hormones spicing it all up.

Most dogs go through a chewing stage that starts at roughly six months, when their adult teeth finish erupting. It lasts until roughly a year and a half to two years, give or take a few months. This is a normal, although extremely aggravating, developmental stage. What's happening is that exercise and pressure stimulate bone growth. She is exercising her mouth to encourage her body to add bone density in her jaws and anchor her new adult teeth firmly into the bone. The chewing will taper off a lot when she hits full adulthood and stops growing.

Meanwhile, my condolences on having a destructo-puppy. I've been through it. Eye glasses, shoes, books, carpet pads, furniture, cords and cables...my guys destroyed so much stuff. I was able to reduce the amount of damage they did by confining them to a puppy proofed room and also by using exercise pen panels to keep them away from stuff I didn't want them destroying.

 

Haha. Well I appreciate your reply. It's encouraging to know that hopefully she will calm down eventually and that it's normal behavior, not something I'm doing wrong.
I've had mixed results with trying to puppy proof things. She is pretty clever. It took me a while to realize she was laying down low on the ground and slowly sneaking up to the closet when I opened it to get stuff out. She would watch me to see if I was looking and grab stuff when I wasn't. Couldn't figure out how she kept getting stuff, because she was so sneaky about it. Eventually I caught her. I blocked off the kitchen, but she figured out she could run and jump onto the island, slide into the kitchen, grab something then jump back and slide out. I ended up having to make a barrier on top of the the counter but even that took a couple weeks because she kept figuring out ways to move it and get in.

 

Haha. She sounds like she has a lot of smarts, drive, and athleticism. I bet she'd be pretty awesome in some kind of sport: agility, tricks, scent work, barn hunt.

We have a book case next to the door. We put our shoes and boots there when we come inside, so we don't track mud all over the house. One day I watched my adolescent puppy bounce over to it, plop his butt down into a sit, and tilt his head back and forth as he examined each piece of footgear. He looked like a shopper comparing labels and prices at the grocery. Eventually he came to a decision, grabbed one of my Keen sandals, and carried it off to the couch for a nice chew. Nuh-uh, puppydoodle, that's a $70 pair of sandals. You are not chewing it. I gave him a bully stick instead.

One of the games my dogs loved was a treasure hunt in a cardboard box. My town requires us to recycle, so I always have a bin full of paper and small cardboard containers waiting to ride away in the big blue truck: cereal boxes, egg cartons, the box my tea bags came in, etc. I would drop one or two small treats into each little box, nest them into slightly larger boxes like Russian dolls, and then fill one of my Chewy delivery boxes with all the nested boxes and a bunch of crumpled up brown paper grocery bags. My boys loved diving into the box, sniffing out the treats, and tearing open the little containers to get to the snacks. It was a mess to clean up, but it made my boys so happy.

 

Wonder if some 'mind games' might help some. Check pet stores and online for food puzzles, where they have to figure out how to get to the food inside. It helped ours when she was going through her wildly crazy active stage. Also while she and I are out walking, my wife will distribute treats, we use kibble for this, throughout the house. She can hardly wait to get home and go on her 'treasure hunt'. More distractions like described and time will in all likelihood eventually get her past this stage, but I am sympathetic to what you are going through with him.

 

I have had dogs who were aggressive and destructive chewers all their lives, only a couple thank goodness. (I had a lot of dogs pass through my home as I fostered rescues for some years.) So far as I know there's no way to stop the ones who seem to have a strong built-in urge/need. The only thing that works is controlling them, i.e., crating when you can't watch them, yard where there's nothing that can be destroyed. No anti-chew stuff made for dogs ever worked. I could teach them not to do it when I was right there, but not when they were out of sight and had opportunity. Yes, the black Kongs were the only thing that didn't get destroyed, although I've heard of dogs that can tear one of those up. They did get better with age but it never totally stopped. A dog like that actually did $1,500 damage to a car bumper (20 years ago repair prices) when I stupidly parked it inside my yard where she could get to it. Also, yes, she did need a broken tooth extracted although I can't remember how old she was at that time.

These days I sometimes wonder if a raw diet that included bones would have made any difference, but in the days I had the bumper eater, who came to me as a puppy and lived her life with me, it wasn't even on my radar. The chewing had nothing to do with that. She was unadoptable for other reasons.

I hope you're only dealing with more typical adolescent destructiveness and not the lifelong type.

 

'My 9 month old Golden Puppy is the biggest force of destruction I have ever seen.'

Get a DNA test and see if she's Part T. Rex.. This phase may last another 9 mos., or longer.
Watch videos of Hurricanes and nuclear blasts to put this in proper proportion..