It’s a good thing we live in the forest! Because Kloe loves chewing on sticks. With pines, oaks, and cedars all dropping their deadwood around the Golden K Kloe always has a wide variety of sticks to choose from.

When Kloe was a puppy I worried that she might swallow a big piece and choke. Or that the accumulation of stick particles would cause harm to her mouth or stomach. But she doesn’t really eat any of the stick. She gnaws on the larger sticks and shreds the smaller sticks. Kloe can take a moderate size stick – say a half inch to an inch round – and make toothpicks. With larger sizes she is like a wood carver. She’ll create various shapes – sometimes over a period of days with the same large stick – until the stick is small enough to then shred into toothpicks.

A variation of the stick chewing is when Kloe methodically dismantles a pine cone -scale by scale- placing the scales in a pile until the pine cone is reduced to what looks like a corn cob with all the corn off of it. If I try to pick up a pine cone with my bare hands I get stuck if not careful. So it always amazes me that Kloe can pick pine cones up with her mouth with no regard for the sharp needle-like ends of the scale.

Kloe takes her stick chewing pretty seriously. Her focus and intensity is a lot like the aforementioned wood carver carefully planning and then executing each stroke of the knife. Or in Kloe’s case, each chomp of her jaw. She demonstrates quite a bit of artistry with her sticks!

About a year ago I came upon Kloe in one of her favorite chewing spots and captured the photo below. Taken with my iPhone in portrait mode this shot highlights my sweet girl at work in her “studio” carving away with a large inventory of sticks nearby for future Stick Art projects.