If your puppy has chewed three of your shoes this week, they are not being naughty. They are teething, bored, or stressed. The fix is different for each one, and most owners apply the wrong fix because they have not stopped to ask which it is.

Destructive chewing in puppies under fourteen weeks is almost always developmental and entirely normal. Your job is to redirect, not suppress, and to manage the environment so your puppy cannot practise on the wrong things. Here is what is actually going on and what to do about it.

Why puppies chew in the first place

There are three causes of destructive chewing and the protocol for each is different. Getting the diagnosis right is most of the work.

Teething (8 to 16 weeks)

Between eight and sixteen weeks, your puppy is cutting their first teeth and their gums are uncomfortable. Chewing relieves that pressure. This is not bad behaviour. It is biology. At this stage almost anything is fair game. Skirting boards, table legs, shoe laces, the kids' toys. The texture is often the attraction rather than the item itself.

How to tell this is the cause. Your puppy is under sixteen weeks. Chewing is indiscriminate, they will chew anything in reach. It reduces when they have access to something cold or satisfying to gnaw on.

Boredom and under-stimulation

A puppy with nothing to do will create something to do. Chewing is one of the most satisfying self-rewarding behaviours available to a dog. It releases endorphins. It passes time. The item often gets more interesting the more you chew it. A puppy left in a room with shoes, rugs, and chair legs and no outlet will chew them. This is not defiance. It is what bored dogs do.

How to tell. The chewing happens when your puppy has been left without engagement or enrichment, often in the afternoon. It tends to focus on whichever items are most accessible rather than the same item repeatedly. Your puppy is otherwise calm and happy in social time.

A puppy under four months does not need long walks to be tired. They need mental engagement. Short bursts of sniffing, training, and chew time will do more than a 45-minute walk that overloads developing joints. The general guideline is five minutes of on-lead exercise per month of age, twice per day.

Stress and over-arousal

A puppy who is anxious, whether from separation, a new environment, or arousal with nowhere to go, will often chew as a displacement behaviour. The chewing is not opportunistic. It has a driven quality. Your puppy may return to the same item repeatedly, or chew when you leave the room even briefly.

This is the cause most commonly misread as stubbornness or spite.

How to tell. The chewing happens specifically when you leave, or when your puppy cannot settle. It may come with pacing, whining, or following you from room to room. Separation-related chewing almost always starts in the first fifteen to thirty minutes of you being absent.

What most owners do wrong

Telling the puppy off. Shouting "no" after the fact does nothing. Your puppy cannot connect a verbal correction to something they did twenty seconds ago. Even catching them in the act and shouting is largely ineffective, because you are now bringing excited, high-energy interaction to the exact moment they are doing something wrong. That is not how dogs learn. The response to unwanted behaviour in a puppy is calm redirection, not noise.

Removing everything chewable and leaving it at that. Clearing the floor is excellent prevention and should be the first step. But owners who only do this have taught the puppy nothing. The puppy now has a different problem to chew. When an item inevitably gets left out, a child's shoe, a phone charger, a bag strap, your puppy chews it, you are furious, and the cycle starts again. Prevention plus active redirection. Not prevention alone.

Bitter sprays as the whole strategy. Bitter apple and similar deterrents work for some puppies on some surfaces some of the time. They are not a training tool. A puppy who is bored or teething will often chew through deterrents anyway. They are useful as a temporary barrier on one specific item while you work on the behaviour. Not a substitute for engagement.

The redirect, do not punish protocol

The moment you catch your puppy chewing something they should not, the sequence is this.

Step 1, no speaking. Do not say your puppy's name. Do not say "no." Do not say anything. The moment you speak you create engagement. Stay completely silent.

Step 2, calm collar walk. Move calmly to your puppy. Take the collar with an underhand grip, palm facing up, under the chin. Do not pull or yank. Walk your puppy two to three steps away from the item. This is the physical redirect. It separates them from the behaviour without drama.

Step 3, give the replacement immediately. Have an acceptable chew ready before you start training for this. The moment your puppy is away from the forbidden item, offer it. This is the critical step most owners miss. They redirect without giving the puppy somewhere to put the chewing energy. It goes straight back to the skirting board.

Step 4, walk away. Do not hover. Do not watch the puppy chewing the toy like you are waiting for them to do something wrong. Walk away. Your puppy's interaction with the correct item is its own reward.

Step 5, if they return to the forbidden item, isolate. No drama. No lecture. Calm collar walk to a boring room. One to three minutes. Release without interaction. This is a timeout as a reset, not a punishment. Your puppy learns: chewing that thing ends the fun.

If your puppy is at a 7 or 8 on the energy scale, sprinting around, highly stimulated, calm them down before attempting any redirect. An over-aroused puppy cannot receive information. Bring the energy down first with a quiet calm presence, or a short SSCD exercise on a short lead inside.

What to actually buy, and what is a waste of money

Worth the money.

Frozen Kongs and similar stuffed rubber toys. Fill with puppy-safe food. Mashed sweet potato, plain yoghurt, their own wet food. Freeze. A frozen Kong takes twenty to forty minutes to work through and keeps a teething puppy's gums cold while satisfying the urge to gnaw. This is the single most effective tool for the eight to sixteen week teething window.

Rubber chew toys, medium hardness. Look for toys that have some give but cannot be torn apart in five minutes. Your puppy needs something that fights back slightly. That resistance is part of the satisfaction. Avoid anything marketed as "indestructible" for serious chewers at this age. Often too hard for puppy gums.

Snufflemats and lick mats. Engagement tools, not purely chew tools. A snuffle mat hides kibble in rubber strands and your puppy has to sniff it out. A lick mat with peanut butter, xylitol-free, this is important, or soft food scratches the same itch as chewing. Particularly useful in the evening when you need your puppy to decompress without exciting play.

Wet cloth toy, frozen. A knotted tea towel soaked in water and frozen. Costs nothing. Excellent for peak teething discomfort. Swap for a new one when it thaws.

Wasted money for serious chewers.

Squeaky toys. Destroyed in ten minutes and the puppy swallows pieces. These are engagement toys for playful puppies, not chew tools.

Rope toys for serious chewers. Strands unravel and puppies ingest them. Fine for tug play under supervision. Not appropriate left with a determined chewer unattended.

Rawhide. The risk of intestinal blockage from swallowed pieces is real. Avoid.

Cheap plush toys. Demolished in minutes, stuffing swallowed. Buy them for cuddling only, not for chewing.

When chewing crosses into destructive behaviour

Most puppy chewing resolves by fourteen to sixteen weeks as teething eases and you get on top of management. The cases worth taking seriously are those where the chewing is clearly anxiety-driven and separation-related.

The signs that point to something bigger:

Your puppy destroys things specifically when you leave, even for a few minutes. The chewing focuses on exits, door frames, the area around the front door, window ledges. It comes with other separation signs. Pacing, whining, loss of toilet training when alone, following you obsessively before departure. Your puppy cannot settle when you are home. Always "on," always seeking contact.

Inside the Relational Leadership framework, a puppy showing this kind of separation distress believes they are the leader of the household. The drive to chew, escape, and vocalise when alone comes from leadership stress, not from missing you in a sentimental way. Their job, as they understand it, is to protect the pack, and they cannot do that when you are out of sight. This is not something a lick mat will fix. It needs the underlying dynamic addressed, the five Golden Rules in place, alongside a structured plan of short, deliberate separations built up gradually. The piece on Relational Leadership covers the framework.

If a new owner describes all of the above two weeks in with a puppy, they need a trainer, not more chew toys.

A two-week plan for an 8 to 14-week-old puppy

Before anything else, do a prevention audit. Walk through every room your puppy has access to. Anything at floor level that should not be chewed, move it. This is not a permanent solution but it removes the opportunity while training is being established. Buy a baby gate if needed.

Days 1 to 3. Set up the environment and the rotation. Have three to five acceptable chew options ready. Frozen Kongs are non-negotiable for this age. Rotate what your puppy has access to each day so nothing loses novelty. Start the collar walk redirect every single time you catch them on a forbidden item. No exceptions. No "just this once." Consistency in these first three days is the foundation.

Days 4 to 7. The redirect becomes a reflex. By now your puppy should be seeing the pattern. Chewing the wrong thing results in a calm, silent removal and placement with the right thing. No drama in either direction. Begin very short separations. Leave the room for twenty to thirty seconds, return, do not greet your puppy. This is preparation for the longer separations a working owner will need. Apply Rule 3, complete ignore on return, from day one.

Days 8 to 10. Introduce a crate or pen as the settled space. A puppy with a safe, defined area associated with rest and appropriate chewing is far less likely to roam and destroy. Feed meals in the crate. Leave the door open. Do not lock them in for extended periods yet. This is about positive association. Timeout stays available for any redirect that fails.

Days 11 to 14. Audit and adjust. By the end of two weeks you should see a clear reduction in chewing on forbidden items. If you are not, the honest answer is usually one of three things. The environment is not managed well enough, too many opportunities still exist. The redirect is not happening consistently by every person in the household. There are anxiety signals that need addressing separately. Your puppy is not the problem. The system is.

What you should see by week two. A puppy that goes to an acceptable chew item when stimulated. Engages with Kongs and enrichment tools for meaningful stretches. Responds to the collar redirect within a session or two rather than returning immediately to the forbidden item.

If you want a structured framework for the first six months that covers chewing, biting, toilet training, separation, and the whole puppy curriculum, the Complete Puppy Program is built for it. The puppy who is told off, has all the temptation removed, and is left to "grow out of it" does not grow out of it. They grow into a dog who has rehearsed chewing as a self-soothing behaviour for six months. The earlier the redirect-and-replace habit is established, the less there is to undo later.