How to Stop an Adult Dog From Destructive Chewing

By Jessica Ennis, DVM, CVA

✓ Medically reviewed by Jessica Ennis, DVM, CVA — August 19, 2026 For general education — not a substitute for veterinary care.

Behavior & enrichment · August 21, 2026 · 6 min read

Stopping destructive chewing in an adult dog starts with figuring out which of three drivers you're actually dealing with.

Before you touch a single product or training tool, run your dog through this checklist. It’s the same order I walk owners through in an exam room.

• Rule out pain or GI discomfort first — new chewing that starts abruptly, especially chewing paired with drooling or reduced appetite, warrants a vet visit before anything else.
• Log when it happens, not just what gets chewed — chewing that clusters around your departure looks different from chewing that happens all evening while you’re home.
• Audit exercise and mental work over the last week, not just today — a single walk rarely offsets a dog bred for a job.
• Check what’s actually available to chew — a dog without a legal outlet will find an illegal one.
• Only then consider calming support — as an add-on to the plan above, never as the plan itself.

I keep that order strict because owners almost always want to skip to the last item. It’s the one that feels like it requires the least change on their end.

The dog on my exam table who taught me to ask about timing first

A few years into practice, I saw a four-year-old Lab mix named Gus for what his owner described as “spite chewing” — he’d started working through the corner of the kitchen baseboard and, one Tuesday, the leg of a dining chair. The owner had noticed it only ever happened on days she left for a full workday, never on weekends. Gus was 68 pounds, food-motivated, and by her account had never chewed anything as a younger dog. We talked through his week: a 15-minute morning walk, long solo hours in a crate-free kitchen, and a dinner that came the second she walked in the door. Nothing about his diet or his joints stood out on exam. What stood out was the pattern — the chewing wasn’t random destruction, it was concentrated in the first two hours after she left. That timing detail is what moved this from “give him more toys” to a conversation about how he handled being alone, and it changed the whole plan we built for him.

Boredom chewing versus anxiety chewing looks different once you’re watching for it

Boredom chewing tends to spread across the day, often worse in the evening when a dog has had the most unstructured downtime, and it tends to target whatever’s novel or accessible — a new pair of shoes, a dropped sock, a table leg within reach of the couch. Anxiety-driven chewing clusters tightly around departures and often comes with other signs: pacing before you leave, drooling, or chewing concentrated at exit points like doors and window frames. We’ve written a full breakdown of that distinction in Is My Dog Chewing Out of Boredom or Anxiety?, and it’s worth reading in full if your dog’s pattern doesn’t cleanly match either description above — plenty of adult dogs have some of both.

The distinction matters because the fix is different. A bored dog generally responds to more structured physical and mental output plus better management of access. An anxious dog needs that too, but the deeper work is changing how departures feel — short absences that build up gradually, a consistent pre-departure routine, and in some cases a veterinary behaviorist referral if the anxiety is severe.

What to change today, before you buy anything

Increase structured exercise, not just yard time. A 20-minute walk with sniffing time and a few minutes of obedience work taxes a dog’s brain more than an hour of solo backyard access. Add a food puzzle or a stuffed, frozen chew at the times chewing tends to happen — right after you leave, or during the evening lull. Remove easy targets: baseboards get bitter apple spray, shoes go in a closed closet, and countertop items get pushed back. None of this is glamorous. It’s also the part that actually works for most dogs, which is why I lead with it every time instead of jumping to a product.

Crate or confine to a chew-proofed space when you can’t supervise, especially during the first few weeks of a behavior change plan — not as punishment, but because interrupting the rehearsal of the habit matters as much as building the new one.

Where calming support fits, and where it doesn’t

For dogs whose chewing is tangled up with anxiety rather than boredom, some owners ask about calming supplements. The evidence here is real but modest, and it’s worth being precise about what it does and doesn’t say. Chamomile and L-theanine have both been studied for stress and anxiety, though for chamomile specifically, “Biomedicines: for the remaining species, evidence is derived mainly from preclinical studies or traditional use” — meaning most of what we know comes from lab and traditional-use data rather than large dog trials. L-theanine has firmer human evidence in a narrow context: one review notes benefit “Molecular Psychiatry: except for one study on psychotic anxiety (SMD = 0.54; 400 mg/day for 8 weeks),” a dosing context specific to humans, not dogs. Ashwagandha has the most consistent human data of the three — a systematic review “Cureus: analyzed multiple RCTs and concluded that ashwagandha has a moderate positive impact on stress reduction and cognitive performance.”

None of that is a green light to treat a supplement as the fix for destructive chewing. I’ve watched owners buy a calming chew, see no change in three days, and give up on the whole plan — when the supplement was never going to do the job that exercise, management, and departure training were supposed to do. If you use one, use it as support alongside the behavior work, not instead of it, and talk to your vet about dose and interactions first.

When it’s not boredom or anxiety at all

A smaller number of adult dogs chew because of an unmet physical need that has nothing to do with behavior in the usual sense — dental pain, a GI issue, or in older dogs, early cognitive changes that show up as new, out-of-character habits. If chewing starts suddenly in a dog with no history of it, especially past age seven or eight, that’s a vet visit before a training plan. This is also a good moment to distinguish true anxiety-driven destruction from other arousal states; if your dog’s chewing is tangled up with fence-line reactivity or barrier behavior, our piece on Barrier Frustration vs Aggression can help you sort out whether you’re dealing with one issue or two running in parallel. And if the chewing started around the same time as new separation-related symptoms, Boredom vs Separation Anxiety: How to Tell the Difference is worth reading before you commit to a plan.

The plan I’d actually give you tonight

Gus’s owner and I settled on a three-week plan: a longer morning walk with sniff time, a frozen Kong given at the exact moment she left, and short practice departures on weekends to decouple “she’s leaving” from “something bad is about to happen.” By week two, the baseboard was untouched. That’s one dog’s outcome, not a promise about yours — but it’s the shape of what tends to work when the plan matches the actual driver instead of guessing.

If your dog’s chewing hasn’t budged after two to three weeks of consistent exercise, management, and departure work, that’s the point to loop in your veterinarian or a certified behaviorist rather than escalating the supplement or the punishment. Most adult dogs don’t need a dramatic intervention. They need a tired body, a legal outlet, and — if anxiety is part of the picture — a slower, kinder path back to feeling okay when you walk out the door.