Weasels

Some great suggestions on this thread. While of course plenty of exercise is great, I believe at some point dogs need to learn/be taught to be calm when there's nothing to do. My younger boy had a chewing problem when we first got him at 9 months, although he wasn't as bad as your description . Since he's a smart lad (kelpie), I started using cue words ("good chew" and "bad chew", although these are pretty bad ones in retrospect for a doggy brain to figure out). When he had a shoe he got a sharp "hey" followed by "bad chew" and the shoe taken away. After a couple of minutes I'd give him an appropriate toy and when he chewed that a "good chew" and praise, maybe a game of tug with it. After a while often if he found something new he'd bring it over to us to check if it was ok (cute). We leave our shoes on the floor all the time now with no issues. If it's the destruction they love, I find those annoying community newpapers to be perfect (but messy).

Ah, fair enough then. But if he's improved already it certainly bodes well I still make sure my dogs have something to occupy them as I go out, I give them a pigs ear/kong/whatever about 5 mins before I leave, and now most of the time they don't even look up when I go! Best of luck

How long have you had him? Our first rescue girl had separation distress when we got her (howling at the door, whining and pacing), and we did all the usual stuff with her - giving her a bone or kong to work on, not making a fuss, going out and coming straight back in again, creating 'distance' while we were home, both by ignoring and by creating situations where she could see us but couldn't get to us. She got over it after about 3 weeks, but I think a big part of the problem was we were leaving her alone in a strange place. Once she felt comfortable it was her new home (and starting her territorial barking :/) whether we were there was less important.

Although to be fair, having recently investigated how many subspecies of wolf there are on wikipedia, I would avoid the whole damn thing too. The vonHoldt paper from memory just identified C. lupus without any subspecific designations. Plus there are a lot of sources on the web which say dingoes are decended/semidomesticated from C. l. pallipes based on speculation from some old (pre-DNA) references (i.e., they look alike),which would add to the confusion.