"Joys" of teething, Share your Stories! - Page 1

Well, in most recent events, Beau is feeling GREAT (not sure if it's the Albon, Fortiflora, lack of raw feeding, Antibiotics for his stomach or what?) and great news, TEETHING HAS BEGUN (Anyone else hear Jaws theme music playing?)

I love my son, that much should be obvious by now, but man oh man, I was NOT looking forward to the teething stage. The chewing, stepping on needle teeth in the carpeting, blood on stuff and his poor swollen gums. Seems like it was just yesterday I was bringing him home in the pickup, now he's teething, HUGE and developing drives...where does the time go?

As of yet, I do not have any funny stories in regards to Beau's teething as he's just starting the chewing phase, he hasn't actually lost any teeth - yet.

However, I do have a semi-funny story about another dog from a few years back. It might make you laugh, just a little.

Lilly was a Pitbull x Great Dane (don't ask me how THAT one happened...Steps?) we had adopted from the Humane Society. She was great, beautiful and sweet as can be! She started teething shortly after we had adopted her. I was out visiting friends and my husband was home for the day and "baby sitting" Lilly. Things are going fine, my friends and I went shopping, just having a girls day and were on our way to the movies when I get this frantic phone call. Nick calls me up screaming, claiming Lilly was "dying", "Oh god baby, she's dying, there's blood EVERYWHERE and its pouring out of her mouth, on top of it all, I went to the bathroom and the carpeting nails must be coming up! Get home now, I don't where the vet is and we need HELP!"  *CLICK* He had hung up.

I ran back to the Firebird, did 90 all the way down the highway to get home. By some MIRACLE I never was stopped by a cop. I ran in, eyes watering thinking my puppy's dying from an unknown cause! Lilly's sitting on the couch with a **LITTLE** blood by her mouth, a **SLIGHTLY** bloody rope toy and my husbands bawling like a baby with a washcloth on his foot. I ran to Lilly, pryed open her jaws, and looked in at the little hole where one of her canines used to be and laughed a little. I then went over to my hysterical husband, flipped over his foot, grabbed some tweezers and pulled the canine tooth from the bottom of his heel while he screamed bloody murder.

Needless to say, Lilly was obviously fine, I gave her an icecube to chew on and told my husband to go take a bath, he needed to calm down.  O_o

That is hilarious! I can absolutely see my tough guy husband doing the same thing. :D 

I don't have any funny stories from most of my dogs, they seem to have swallowed their teeth or left them in toys) but my last working line GSD had a canine come in and his baby tooth just would not fall out and started to turn black (they are hollow) and fill with grass and food and everythiing else he put in his silly puppy mouth until he smelled like a sewer (at least to me, I think it was all of one day between me noticing and doing something about it). I called my vet and he said just to pull it out or bring him in and he'd pull it out, no big deal. But all I could remember was when I was teething and young and I think my mother actually force pulled one of my teeth out and it bloody HURT! 

I somehow managed to get some resolve and courage up. And probably had a glass of wine (bad dentist!). So I got a rubber glove for traction and took him outside and laid him calmly on the lawn feeling like I was about to kill him. The tooth came out without him even noticing when I pulled on it and he just looked at me wondering why I looked like I was having a heart attack...

I think I'd rather have a funny story. I'm sure my husband will be shrieking about the dog dying when we get our new pup. I will make sure not to warn him about teething. :D

LOL! They can be such BABIES! (Husbands, that is!)

When my GSD (the one I had when we got married) impaled herself on a stick, and had to have antibiotics 3x a day, guess who had to come home from work to give them on her lunch break?
Luckily, I was working close by... 


Teething stories? Would you like to see some pictures?

Puppy Kong




Black Kong - the first bit of damage



Black Kong a few months later (she kept finding it and stealing it!)



A New Toy .....YUMMMM!



One Week Later....




Needless to say, and fortunately for me, she seems to have a cast iron gut, and all the bits of toy either pass through or come right back up...

This does not, of course, include the numerous socks she chewed up, the Bible she destroyed (along with two precious photos of my Dad in his Model A Ford!) nor the damage done to the chair legs of my dining room set. She also destroyed every rug in the house, except the living room rug. (I made SURE I kept the doors to the living room CLOSED!)

Fortunately, since I'm an experienced dog owner, none of the rugs were very expensive. Most of them were purchased from thrift stores, and one was even a 'curbside pickup'.

The next puppy I raised chewed a hole in the skirt of a living room chair, and chewed the corners off the coffee table. Fortunately, it was a thrift store find I'd had for many years, so I wasn't too upset. I bought a new one, and am saving the old one for the next puppy I raise!

I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting. Puppy raising is similar to childbirth: after awhile amnesia kicks in, and you forget the pain!

Hahahaha, love BOTH of the stories! Not so much that part about the pictures being eaten though, THAT kind of stuff can NEVER be replaced. Only if a time machine exisited. 

Yeah, my mother used to make me pull my own teeth, too. Mine didn't hurt too bad by the time I had moved through most of my mouth. I rememeber one year, my mom told me for school pictures to keep my mouth closed so I wouldn't look like an idiot hillbilly with missing teeth. Yeah, nice motherly advice to her 6year old child. 

Sunsilver, I LOVE thrift stores! 90% of my pictures hanging on my walls (all various flowers, mostly Orchids, Magnolias and a few Iris') are from thrift stores! The current huge blue sectional in my living room is from a thrift store, and I swear it's made of Kevlar, my two fur kids (Beau the GSD and Lilah the Pitbull) have tried their damndest and cannot destroy this poor couch! 

Funny how some dogs love Kongs. In all of my years of owning GSDs and various other dogs, I've never had even one dog ever use a Kong for anything other than a yard ornament. Beau has a puppy teething kong in his pen right now, his towls he sleeps on see more action than that stupid kong.

He LOVES his puppy teething keys though.

Not exactly a teething story, but I used to work at a Pet Valu store and we supplied the local police K9's with their food.

I remember one time a young cop came in, he was a really nice guy. He was asking me about the Kong toys and if any were stronger than thte red ones. I directed him to the black, larger sized ones and he told me that he'd left his brand new dog in the back of the cruiser with a red Kong and the dog had completely inhaled it.

He said he was freaking out, they'd just given him the dog and he wasn't sure what to do. He ended up taking the dog to the vet where they induced vomiting, and he said there were large enough pices that it probably would have caused trouble. So crisis averted. It was cute though, going through all the Kongs with him while he inspected them all. LOL He kept saying "I'm never going to leave him alone with his toys again!"  :D

DDR, the teething toy I bought for her before I brought her home lasted about a month. It wasn't keys, but a triangular shaped piece of plastic with little nubs on it. First, she chewed the nubs off, then she chewed a piece out of it. At that point, it went into the garbage.

And I couldn't put ANY bedding in her crate, because she'd eat it. She even chewed up my service dog's harness when I left it lying ontop of her crate, and she managed to pull it through the air vents!

The problem is you want your pup to have something to chew on so your furniture, rugs, etc. don't suffer. But it seems with some of these little sharks (see above story about the police K9!) there's NOTHING that's safe to leave with them!

Fortunately, I had already scanned my Dad's photo into the computer, and my aunt still had the original black and white negative, so they weren'tt such a great loss. The Bible, OTOH, made me cry. My nephew carried the rings down the aisle on my wedding day ontop of that Bible. It had been bought specially for the wedding, and had the date inscribed on the presentation page. It was my favourite Bible, the one I used all the time. To make it even worse, my husband had passed away from cancer a couple of years before. 

Star was NOT very popular with me that day. I had to put her in her crate for quite a while, because I was so angry I was afraid I might lash out at her.

Too funny.  In addition to GSD, I also have a lab/rotti mix.  So Nothing is safe in my home.

The funniest story I have is when Rose and my lab (Bane) decided to take apart their dog house.  I did not notice what was going on until one day I hear a loud boom from their yard.  I went out to see what had happened.  Bane was standing on top of a flatten dog house with a surprise look on his face.   LOL, him and Rose had been chewing on the dog house and taking the boards off.  It must have finally colapsed during a game of "King of the Dog House."

I always took old wash rags, wetted and then froze them. Just to give them a little soothing, cooling time. 

I still have teeth marks on the legs of assorted pieces of furniture. Since I like old stuff, I figure it gives everything a kind of provenance. 

My favorite teething story though, was with the yellow lab I had in college. We barricaded him in the kitchenette area while at classes. When we got back, every cabinet had been chewed on the bottoms. We were extremely lucky to have a blind landlord, when it came time to move on. 

Frozen carrots are good too. I amazingly have never had a dog that chewed anything that wasn't a bone except for my rescue dobe who liked to eat anything fabric or rubber in his crate. And only had one dog that didn't ignore kongs and actually enjoyed peanut butter or yogurt frozen in them. He had a hummingbird tongue and would clear out every speck of food inside.