[Chewie1]

I know exactly what you are going through. Chewie is just over 5 months old now, everywhere we go, he is putting everything he can in his mouth. It was a nightmare to begin with. Very difficult to walk with. We were constantly picking him up, opening his mouth, and using what I call the Gravity drop, holding him at an angle so when you held his mouth open the stones etc would fall out. Or my partner was always going into his mouth go get things out. I was really feeling awful.

We tried everything, teaching him the "drop" command, worked great with toys in the house but outside we had no luck. The worst thing I've seen go in his mouth was a massive hard boiled sweet, and it scared me to death. Luckily I managed to get it out of his mouth before he choked on it.

He is lightning fast and spots things twenty times quicker than I can! But the thing that has worked best for us, and I'm not saying this would work for everyone, but it definitely did in our case was to ignore him. It was really tough at first because I was so worried about what he could possibly pick up and felt like the awful person of just ignoring it. But from the moment we started ignoring him, he started dropping things once he realised "mummy doesn't care". It became less of a game for him. Obviously I tried to guide him away from really dangerous objects but I kept a loose leash (where as I always had him on such a tight leash to try and stop him, which again probably was forcing him to pull against me thinking it was a game) and I would let him go and pick up a leaf, and instead of giving him attention I would continue to walk on and just say "come on" in a friendly happy voice and straight away he started dropping things and walking on with me. It took maybe a couple of weeks where he would still pick everything up, and there would be the odd thing that we would have to reach in there and get but after those couple of weeks, he just started sniffing stones/leaves/grass etc and I think realised he wasn't going to get a reaction out of me so he just carries on walking.

It took a long, frustrating time to figure out what would work for our boy, but now we figured it out, it's a blessing. And he walks great now!

Hope you manage to find some advice that works for your boy!