Hi all! My husband and I were recently adopted by a young husky girl I found in pretty rough shape. Owners registered on chip denied ownership so we brought her into our home and quickly found ourselves head over heels crazy about this little girl. I've been checking out this site for a few months and found a lot of really good information here and so I finally decided to join. We are learning about huskies and their delightful personality quirks, their need to be kept busy, (is this why our yard now resembles Swiss cheese?) as we go, which brings me to this: our husky (Ziva) eats dirt. A lot. I've read that this could be due to mineral deficiency, though we feed her pretty good dog food plus raw meat. Is this something huskies do when they're bored or depressed? Or perhaps should we change the dog food? We buy Fromm's adult (the vet believes she's around 2-3 years old). Thanks for any advice!

I wouldn't change the food unless the Vet recommends it - and Science Diet is not a good substitute for Fromm's!!

Now, dogs do a lot of things when they get bored, digging is probably the most common when it comes to Huskies (chewing things is common with ALL dogs!)  Take a look at this blog entry from PetMD and see how it stacks up.

Depending on the company with which the Chip is registered you'll have a problem getting it put into your name.  If the 'previous <non>owners' are local to you, you might be able to get them to release her to you.  The Chip is proof of ownership so that dogs can't be stolen and resold (among other things) so you can see why the Chip Companies are real reluctant to 'take your word' that you adopted her off the street.  If you adopted her from a rescue they might be able to help get the Chip registered in your name.  Don't go for another chip, most vets won't do that anyway and it only confuses the ownership question.

I was stationed in Japan in the '60s - long after WW II ended but we still had to watch our footing in the public parks because of old bomb craters.  Some yards I've seen look a lot more like the results of 'carpet bombing runs' than anything else.  You might want to make her a sand box and direct her digging there rather than the yard.

My back yard i dont walk in unless i have too. I would take the swiss cheese of a back yard over the tunnel system under my back yard (if its rained or the snow melts and i step on top a tunnel they collapse) but whether you go the sandbox route or not my experience is teaching them to dig where its appropriate is much easier then trying to keep them from digging. With the eating dirt could be boredom could be the dog food not meeting some mineral requirement could even be for some reason your dog thinks dirt is tasty (several dogs ive had seemed to really like eating horse poop) all of my dogs are on vitamins even with really good dog food heres a great example of my back yard

Z'ev eats dirt, too. He's on a good food. He's very specific about the exact dirt he eats, I think he smells something tasty - he'll be walking along, stop as if something called to him, sniff, scratch a bit then lie down and nibble on the dirt.

Now THAT is an impressive hole!

We are proud owners of a 4 month old female named Piper. We are new husky owners. I have raised labs my whole life and this experience is very new to me. Wow, what a difference in breed, not negative, just different. Piper ingests soft items in a second. Like she doesn't chew them, she swallows them in a moments time. She actually does this with any soft, cloth like item. We are very careful to avoid making these items available to her, but with two teenagers, we slip up at times. Thank god, she has either vomited them up (whole) or passed them so far. Is this a husky thing or is this just a Piper thing?

Thanks for all of your responses. I won't stress a whole lot over the dirt eating thing, and I like the idea of teaching her appropriate places to dig...huskies are stubborn, though, we're finding! Btw Lostmaniac, that is a fantastic tunnel!!!

That tunnel i thought was a den until all 6 dogs disappeared into it and realized that the 5 "dens" were actually an interconnected tunnel system that was just the biggest entrance they had ever built at the time. When monsoon season came it collapsed and i measured almost 600 ft of tunnel. Sometimes i think my girls are reincarnated miners

Congrats on being adopted by a husky! They can be pretty picky, so you must be nice humans!

So anyway -
I read an interesting thread from the German Shepherd forum where somebody's shepherd seemed obsessed with eating dirt. A forum member recommended sprinkling their dogfood with something like "homeostatic soil organisms" which is available in Whole Foods, and apparently it worked!! After a week of sprinkling, their dog stopped eating dirt.

Apparently their body craves something in the dirt...? My theory is that for all those gazillions of years when dogs were scavenging and eating killed critters, before the age of dog kibble, they probably got dirt mixed in with their food every time, and it may actually be a healthy part of a dog's gut "macrobiome"? I don't know... but it's interesting...

@Lostmaniac, that is amazing and LOL...600 ft of tunnel, 6 dogs...I know my dog is jealous just hearing about it!!

We are down to 4 now had to rehome the chihuahua and the pit/great dane puppy. When we had the 6 we were renting a house that turns out wasnt legal to occupy due to the well wasnt legal for anything but irrigation and when the water turned blue we had it tested the day the water test came back the house was deemed uninhabitable and we decided to buy instead of rent which takes time and try getting a motel room with 6 dogs... we found 1 that would take 4 and no other options but to rehome the puppy and the evil chihuahua

I never really thought much on this, but Kona gets a few licks of dirt. But:

Only on our morning walk
Never from our yard (sand)
Never from the beach (more sand)
Two spots - on a sidewalk there's one large rock that he grabs a taste of dirt while marking
and another tasting is just before the last corner on our walk.

I figured since those are high traffic areas and he's just grabbing additional info from other dogs; hadn't considered nutrition...