In our early weeks with Kyndall, we complained a lot about how she slashed our hands and arms with her razor-sharp puppy teeth. Now all those teeth are gone. Instead she has beautiful white chompers that lack needle-sharp points, and she almost never applies them to our flesh. But they’re become destructive in a different way.
As the last of those big-dog teeth have come in, her craving to chew has turned voracious. Applying that appetite to the toys that amused her when she was tiny has resulted in many of them being annihilated.
Happily, she doesn’t seem to swallow most of the pieces, and whatever fragments she has swallowed haven’t irritated her digestive system (unlike Dionne, our last CCI trainee, who vomited sometimes daily all the odd bits she scavenged). In addition to enjoying the ripping apart, Kyndall radiates pleasure while chewing on the individual rubber chunks, much like a baseball player working on a wad, or a teenager on chewing gum. I should stop her, I know, but she has such a good time I sometimes find it easier just to photograph the spectacle.
Steve has a theory that dogs need to jaw to set their adult teeth in their jaws. That sounds good to me, except I haven’t found anything online that confirms it. For now, Kyndall has almost worked her way through our supply of destructible toys, and last night she did in one of the theoretically indestructible, CCI-approved ones (the Kong, at right.)
But she’s told us not to worry. The yard is full of her other favorite plaything (sticks).
