My Foster Puppy Chewed Through My Baseboards and I Only Had Myself to Blame — Here's the Toy Strategy That Finally Stopped the Destruction

A puppy's mouth is a tiny garbage disposal that runs on chaos and spite and has absolutely zero respect for your security deposit. I learned this the hard way during a Zoom meeting in 2021 when my build puppy Luna, a 14-week-old shepherd mix who'd been quiet for maybe nine seconds, emerged from behind my desk with a chunk of baseboard in her jowks like some sort of deranged carpenter. The baseboard was now a pile of splinters and spit. And I just sat there, frozen on camera, trying to mouth "I'm fine" while my boss asked if I had a woodchipper running in the background.

That was the day I realized I'd been getting teething toys all wrong. Not just a little wrong. Completely, embarrassingly, baseboard-destroyingly wrong.