Dog Problems  

We've owned a home before and in our last our primary pet was a cat. Well cats. We would find abandoned kittens under a bush in our front yard constantly. We learned not to call animal control because they just kill kittens so we started taking care of them. Its important that a kitten be with its mother because mothers milk helps their immune systems along. Because mother was not there we had to buy kitten formula from the pet store and bottle feed them. Out of the many cats we found we only kept one. A white cat we named Hermione. Before we moved she was hit by a truck. When we moved we bought a house with an acre of land and I wanted to get a dog. I thought it would instill a good lesson upon my kids to take them down to the animal shelter to buy a dog. My wife wanted a small dog, one that would get no bigger then a large cat, but the second day we came ot the shelter I found the dog I wanted. Chester is a black labrador retriever, when I asked to see him, he ran up to me tail wagging and sat. The thing that impressed me most was that every dog in the shelter was yapping while Chester remained totally calm, not a peep. It took one more day to convince my wife that this was the dog we wanted. The next day we brought him home and let him roam free in the backyard which is about half the size of a football field. I wanted an oustide dog so of course Chester whimpered and whined the first few days and it got so bad I had to put him in the shed to get him to be quiet. That was pretty much the start of our nightmare.

Chester was a chewer. We had not one but two dog houses left over from the previous owners but he wouldn't go in either of them. He never stopped whining so I put him in the shed everynight. When he was comfortable I left the shed doors open so that he could come and go as he pleased. The first night I did so he broke down the small crawlspace door under the house and began to pull insulation off the piping. I nailed that door shut but the next night he chewed up almost everything he could reach in the shed. I bought him chew toys which were junk in mere hours. He did all he could to espace from the back yard, getting trapped when he broke through a wooden fence and found only thorn bushes, another time he escaped and did not come home for half a day. The last straw was when he chewed up the wiring on our cooling system. We paid fifty dollars to have it fixed thanks to a home warrenty that was still available. In panic I made him a cheap pen with his dog houses and some extra fencing we had. It was small but I only needed it for one night. The next morning I found he had worked his way otu of the pen and found his way back to the cooling system where he chewed up the wiring again. I was so angry at him but I also felt frustrated not knowing what to do. My brother in law built a large dog run for him, about the size of two living rooms. He loved it. I thought maybe the wide open spaces were driving him crazy and he just wanted some place not so big. He was still doing stuff like snapping at my hands thinking that I had treats for him, so I stopped giving them to him unless he deserved one, and he would not go in his dog house even if it was raining. If anything his enery is tiring and troubling, like an ADHD child, and he has begun to bark at everything. He even started to dig holes everywhere. Out of everything I need to get him to stop barking. He will wake up mostly around 3 in the morning and varl like crazy. I'll get up and shush him but by then my night of sleep is over. Its getting to the point where I feel as if I can't handle him anymore. I can't even take him for a walk anymore because he has found a way to get out of his last three collars and tears them up. Plagued by problems and looking for advice. Help!