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Victor,

I found in dealing with our cat that the best approach was to avoid anthropomorphism, or the imputation of exclusively human emotions to animals.

Imagine you're in the dog's brain. The traffic there is something like this: <>

Anger or vindictiveness doesn't come into play: the animal is incapable of foreseeing your reaction to its behavior and deliberately chewing things that you value just to make you angry.

It's behavior is more associative-- meat powder means food, which triggers the salivation response. Eventually, the bell that accompanies the meat powder alone causes the salivation response. Left alone, it reverts back to the above soundtrack and begins tearing things up.

I propose a positive and negative reinforcement strategy. DO get something like the Kong, and give it to the dog loaded with food when you go away. The dog may begin to associate YOU with the Kong, and when it goes looking for YOU in the afternoon, it finds the Kong and plays with THAT instead of looking for other stuff it associates less strongly with YOU.

DO also discipline the dog ONLY IF you catch it in the act of destroying something. If you wait until the episode is over, that's outside the animal's memory, and it will associate the discipline with some random event that occurred just prior, which confuses the animal. A sharp word, followed by ignoring the dog for a short time, should be all that is required.

Lastly, dogs are pack animals, they hunt in groups with a recognized alpha group leader. Guess what, Vic? YOU are the Alpha Dominant Leader of the HundGruppe. Make sure the dog understands that by removing all other stimuli during training.

Good luck!