Window licking dog

[Cuppachuchu]

Our 4 year old spaniel likes licking the glass in the kitchen door. He has other funny habits like nudging doors, the vacuum, chairs etc.
Anyone else have this? I dont care about the nudging, but am fed up cleaning the glass.
He is active, and gets plenty of exercise love and attention.

I wonder if he either likes the taste of the cleaning fluid, or if he is not seeing his own reflection in the glass but a dog that he likes the look of grinning back at him and he's trying to be affectionate to "him"?

Beyond distraction techniques I'm not sure what might help. You might have to consider a window blind or something like a little indoor fence (like this: Amazon.co.uk : Indoor Dog Fence) to restrict his immediate access to the glass.

Good luck with it. x

Spaniels can show some quite OCD behaviours. Like shadow chasing, fly snapping and licking.

It can often be linked to stress or anxiety or pain. I would get a vet check to rule out physical issues and then look at reducing your dogs stress levels.

A behaviourist can help but life style changes may help. So look at type of exercise - high energy bal chasing may increase stress levels so change the exercise to calmer sniffing style walks. Look at food look at amount of calm and quality of sleep your dog is getting as a starting point. There may be more obvious sources of stress that can be eliminated

I would introduce a lot of sniffing into their day so scatter feeding meals etc and set up hunting games.

Covering the window will make no difference they will move to another window or damage the covering to get back to the window. Maybe preventing access to the room could help but equally if your dog is finding the behaviour stress reducing this will not help the underlying problem