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Hi All!

I have a new goldendoodle (75% retriever/25% poodle).  She just turned 5 months old and is the light of my life.  However, she loves to eat dirt, wood, and grass.  She loves to eat the grass that comes off the lawnmower after it's dried in clumps, and shes constantly digging and eating the dirt.  We have firewood by our back door and she will get in the pile and bite the wood and eat whatever she can bite off. She's an indoor dog so she only does this when she goes out to potty or play with my other dog.  I stop her everytime i see her do it, but she's quick, and when she see's me coming, she gobbles even faster.  Is this normal?  Is there something missing in her diet?  She eats Taste of the Wild puppy food and is very food motivated.  I feed her 4 cups a day (the bag says 3) but she acts like she's always hungry.  Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated.  I've never had a dog do this before....

Thanks!

Kaye

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Short of having a fecal done to be sure she doesn't have tapeworm or some other type of parasite, the only thing you can really do is supervise her every second that she is outdoors, and hope that she grows out of it. Contrary to popular opinion, it really has nothing to do with something lacking in her diet, as long as she is on a nutritionally complete diet, which she is. 

I agree with Karen . Puppies bit everything and my two still eat some grass when they are out. Since it's not a lot and doesn't seem to cause any problems I let them do it. I don't use chemicals on my grass so I don't worry.
I think there are many of us on here who have doodles who eat non food items of all sorts and are otherwise healthy and have excellent nurtitional diets. My two love to eat fresh cut grass and newly sprouting grass. They look and sound like cows pullling up grass to eat. They have grass in their poop everyday. They are as healthy as can be and are 5 and 3 yrs old. One has eaten anything and everything you can imagine since she was a pup. I guess some just like to chew and graze all day on whatever they can get into thier mouths. I'd keep an eye on her too and if you dont already have it, get insurance. With this type of chewer, I figured it's just a matter of when and not if, they get something stuck in there.

Both my doodles were like this when they were puppies.  I had to physically hold back my Oliver when my Sasha was eating.  I used this time for training etc., now he never wants to eat and both of them have really grown out of this stage.  It took them until they were about a year and a half to get out of this stage.  I always made sure I had plenty of "outside" toys for them to play with and would keep them occupied when we were outside.  Teach them to play fetch etc.  if she if food motivated you can get her to do anything :)   When they did get into something I would re-direct to a toy or a chew toy.  Good luck !

This sounds remarkably normal to me for a five month old. I mean I wish I could tell you she will get over it soon, but probably not very soon. It takes a lot of training of the "leave it" command and even then you may not be successful in stopping some of this behavior. My dogs have all loved the grass clippings at some point in their lives, but they eventually got over it. Dirt, leaves and sticks, oh yeah, all in the mouth. We have one doodle who chewed on everything imaginable outside and inside. He single handedly pulled out every single raspberry stalk when he was one year old. They have thorns! He is orally fixated. He still has to have something in his mouth when he greets us even if we just went out to get the mail. 

Max loves grass, sticks, dirt, rocks, pretty much anything. He is getting a bit better, but still will pick up a big clump of dead grass and dirt and munch away on it. The funny thing is he really isn't that into his dog food. I got insurance, and try not to worry about it too much. I find the more I stress over it the more he does it. He also loves dead things. I was just saying to BG the other day I am pretty sure part of the reason he loves to eat the dead things is because it really gets to me. The other day he had a dead bird and was throwing it up in the air and catching it. I was so grossed out, but I knew I was not going to try and take the disgusting thing out of his mouth and he would not drop it when I said drop it. I was so disgusted I just turned away from him and ignored him. Guess what, he dropped the dead bird and left it there. I am resigned to the fact that he is going to eat non food items, and I do my best to stop him, but I realize I won't always be able to. We work on drop it and leave it every day and I think that's all you can really do. 

Both of mine have been wood eaters, give them a stick and they chew it up, I am constantly picking up sticks that blow out of the trees and getting rid of them in their yard.  Meg is old enough that she will drop it now when ordered...Polly still takes it as a personal challenge to ignore that command when in the yard, everything is tougher in the yard, I so look forward to warmer weather and more yard work on commands.  Polly even pulls the bark off the tree if you don't watch her closer, we are in the process of caging the tree, for her sake as well as the tree's.

Oh, yes, my two like to chew sticks but they spit the pieces out.

My 9 week old ALD loves to pull up grass, chase and eat leaves, chew on sticks and gobble up rocks.  It makes being out side stressful!  Our vet said it was all normal and not to worry about it.  But it is hard not to worry!

Jedi is only 9 wks but he's been driving us crazy trying grass, dirt, and other things including cat poop. Glad to hear that it's normal! 

Sounds like your two best friends will be " Leave it" and supervision.  At that age, Enzo could scoop up a leaf or woodchip without taking an extra step and we would never know until we got into the house with her and she'd deposit it in her "stash" on her bed.  Thankfully, she would never eat it, but it was like some sort of prized possession she had just found.  That phase, for us, didn't last very long.

My Aria is doing all that as well, and she is so fast, I always have her on the leash (all that activity happen only on my backyard)  so I can control what ever I can because she dosen't have all the shots jet.

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