Dog blanket or dog bed: Which is best?
Why do dogs chew holes in blankets?
I had no idea my dog was chewing so many holes in her blankets. When I first adopted Junee on Juneteenth, I’d given her an older, knitted blanket that my grandmother made. I thought it’d be a nice little memory — my puppy would be attached to my grandmother’s handiwork, similar to Linus from The Peanuts. Instead, my dog treated that knit blanket like Charlie Brown did while trying to create a ghost costume.
I shook my head and tested three other types of blankets, trying to figure out which material she’d leave alone. One was a thick fleece with dog images all over it, a second one was a plain maroon blanket I got as a freebie during my trip to Maui and a third one was a yellow sheet. By then, she was a few months older and under the teenage dog umbrella. I didn’t see her chewing much, only frantically situating them for naps. When I walked into a room, she either laid on top of all of the blankets or busily pawed them around.
It wasn’t until I got ready to do laundry a couple of weeks later that I saw it again: Charlie Brown’s ghost costume. She’d chewed so many holes in the blankets that there wasn’t going to be much material left at the rate she was going.
I had to hand it to her. She knew if I caught her in the act, I’d stop her. So she treated me like one big game of Freeze Tag. I left, she chewed. I returned. She positioned herself over the holes. And she was not thrilled when I gathered these blankets up like I did the knitted one and disappeared with them. (This time, I was washing them instead of throwing them away though. She’d shredded the knit blanket to the point where it was just yarn.)
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I hated the sight of them. Although she did have a dog bed in the larger crate and blankets in the smaller crate, I switched the two—if only to save face for guests entering my living room. If guests were familiar enough to walk into my bedroom and see the crate with Charlie Brown ghost blankets, that was fine. But not in my living room.
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According to The Bark, chewing a blanket is normal behavior for dogs. And there was a time when she ignored dog beds completely, preferring to slide them around my laminate wood floors like she was skateboarding. When she was done creating her own roller coaster ride, she’d leave the dog bed in the middle of a hallway and sleep on the couches.
But if she treated the dog bed like a skateboard and the blankets like chew toys, what’s a dog owner to do?