Dogs

Maybe I’m wrong, but this crate thing seems to be something very US American. It’s absolutely unusual in my country and it’s seen as kind of cruel to keep a dog in there for hours.

As it is now, she's got a lot of access to our dirty laundry and she ignores it, and free access to our bed, so I'm not sure that getting more access to our smell would really help matters. And the things she steals usually aren't things we handle a lot or that would hold our smell. It seems like a lot of it is motivated by what she thinks would be fun to play with

Or things that would just cause the most confusion, although I think that's probably too abstract of a thought for even a smart dog like her, but it's kind of hard to explain why she fished a potato out of a bag to bring up to our bed otherwise.

And again, she's not a particularly destructive dog, for the most part she's not really even chewing on most of the things she takes, but her little acts of theft tend to cause other collateral damage and we really worry about her breaking something glass in the process (which has happened) and getting cut (which so far hasn't thankfully)

The other thing is, she might not have enough enrichment. try to get more toys and stuff and see if that helps.

We're already leaving the radio on for her (usually NPR, we figure that's mostly a lot of nice, calm, friendly-sounding voices)

And as it is, she has free reign of most of the house, which includes some dirty laundry in the hamper and, more often than I'd like to admit, on the floor of our bedroom which she never seems to pay any attention to whatsoever

And it's always really limited in scope, it's always just one or two things she gets into, not wanton destruction, I can't really know what's going through her head but it feels a lot like she just wants to do something bad while we're not there to tell her "no".

And often it's pretty benign with her not even trying to be destructive. She might steal a potato or a pack of ramen and carry it over to the stairs, not even bothering to chew on it, but the collateral damage of her getting into the potatoes might knock a bunch of stuff over and break a glass jar on the floor for example.

The time she got into the vitamins, I'm pretty sure her intentions were probably similar until she realized that the bottle rattled, and then she got curious and wanted to know what was inside.

Another dog definitely isn't in the cards for her unfortunately. She's got some pretty bad dog aggression/reactivity issues from getting into a fight with another dog before we got her. We've gotten her to the point where she's OK with a small handful of dogs, and can more-or-less ignore most of the dogs around our neighborhood from a respectable distance, but it's very much on a case-by-case basis.