My Dog Eats Rocks & Socks - What to Do?

By Ed Frawley  |  Last modified: January 9, 2023

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This week, we had a question from a customer who purchased one of our plastic muzzles to stop their dog from eating rocks, wood, and anything it could get ahold of. The dog is 9 months old. They asked how they can reward the dog through the muzzle during training session.

This is serious problem with some dogs. It is very common with small puppies but in a few cases, it can be a lifelong problem with adult dogs. In many cases, it moves from eating rocks to eating socks and items in the house.

There are several things one can do to stop a dog from eating rocks.

1. Use a muzzle.

We sell a plastic training muzzle that has a larger hole right in the front part of the muzzle. You can reward your dog by passing food through the hole.

Our customer was concerned that his dog could still eat small rocks and wood chips through the front hole. He didn't really want to buy another muzzle.

I told him he should just cut a hole himself or buy a second muzzle. They are not expensive.

There really is no magic bullet to fix dogs that do this. It comes down to management and trying to teach a dog, using a muzzle or remote collar to not pick things up and eat them.

If you are going to use a muzzle, the first step is to measure and fit the dog for a muzzle. We have a free video that covers this.

• How To Measure Your Dog For A Muzzle - Free Online Course

• Muzzle Sizing - Free Streaming Video

Then the dog needs to be conditioned to wear the muzzle. We also have an excellent video I produced on teaching trainers how to do this too.

• Conditioning Your Dog to a Muzzle - $20 Online Course

• Conditioning Your Dog to a Muzzle - Free Streaming Video

Once that's done, the dog can be loose in a fenced yard. Our advice would be to monitor the dog for a long time to make sure it doesn't get the muzzle off.

The consequences of a mistake are expensive. If the owner misses the fact that the dog has eaten rocks it can kill the dog. If the owner knows it has eaten rocks, they often need to be surgically removed. This is expensive, up to $2,000.00. We have a friend whose dog has had 3 or 4 surgeries to take socks out of the dogs gut. Now her dog is always supervised, and it always wears a muzzle.

2. Train the YUCK Command

Dogs almost all need to be trained to spit things out when asked. Our command is YUCK. You can use any word you like if it's always the same. If the dog is on leash, this doesn't need to be done in a muzzle.

The moment the dog goes for a rock or junk on the ground, we simply say YUCK and POP the leash.

How hard the leash pop is depends on the dog. It needs to be hard enough to get a behavior change. Too soft and the dog picks the item up. It doesn't take long for the dog to understand that YUCK is going to result in a correction if it doesn't pass on the rock.

It is always best to start the YUCK training on leash. Then with training, the handler can either fade the leash or consider the remote collar. When it comes to the remote, many times the vibration setting is all that's needed.

If we do choose to use a remote collar, we will start to condition the dog to wear the collar when its about 4 months old. At that age we DO NOT use any stimulation. We just want it to get used to wearing the collar and having it go on and come off.

At 7 to 10 months old, the dog can begin low level remote collar work. Exactly when that happens is dog dependent. Note that this is after your dog has already been conditioned to wearing the remote collar.

We do not set the level while we are training a behavior. This is all covered in my video or my online course titled Remote Collar Training for the Pet Owner.

We always start remote collar work in conjunction with the dog on leash. We give a YUCK command followed with a leash POP and a quick vibration from the remote.

If the dog ignores the vibration, we move onto the stimulation. Again, we have already determined the dog's working level away from YUCK training.

Depending on the dog, we will fade the leash pop in favor of the vibration or stimulatuion. Our key is to look for a behavior change with YUCK.

Keep in mind, our end goal is to completely fade the remote collar and have our dog work off the voice command of YUCK.

Once we feel comfortable on our behavior change with YUCK and stimulation, we start reducing the level of stimulation. With some dogs we can fade the remote completely, with others, we can fade to the vibration.

Our advice is to always have the dog wear the collar. We are better to have the collar option than to take it off and then find ourselves wishing we had the collar option.

One thing about this work with the remote collar, our dogs always know that there is an option for a meaningful correction for not complying.

Have a dog training question?

If you have dog training questions, questions about your dog's health, or questions on breeding, view our Ask Cindy section. Cindy has answered thousands of customer questions. You can search through these Q&A's from our Ask Cindy search bar located on the front page of Leerburg.

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About Author

Ed Frawley

Ed Frawley is the founder and owner of Leerburg.com and has been producing professional dog training videos since 1982. Over the years, he has collaborated with some of the most respected dog trainers in the country. His body of work includes 194 full-length training DVDs and 95 comprehensive online courses. In addition to these, he has produced and published over 4,000 short training videos available free of charge on Leerburg.com and across the company's social media platforms.

Ed and his wife, Cindy—also a professional dog trainer—bred working-line German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois for more than 35 years. Although they retired from breeding in 2009, they had produced over 300 litters by that time.

Ed also served as a K9 handler for the local sheriff's department for 10 years, working in partnership with the West Central Drug Task Force. During his time in law enforcement, he handled multiple narcotics and patrol dogs and conducted more than 1,000 K9 searches. If you want to learn more about Ed, read about his history here.

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