Our Akita was a show-up and he hates crates and Dogloos. He totally destroyed his Dogloo within two days, chewing it, picked it up in his teeth (at 5 months!) and rolling it down a slope. He would not use a crate willingly, whined incessantly when put into one and finally would become an immovable object if the word was even uttered. Solution: we fenced off a large area for him that includes the 3-season porch, which is up on short pilings, creating a den. That is his place and he prefers it. Last night, we had thunder and our bedroom has a skylight. He, as usual, began that high-pitched teakettle whine until he was let out and he raced under the porch.
I don’t know about PWDs, but Akitas have very strong jaws and must chew when young to set their teeth firmly into the socket. I have seen him go up to a bush, tear out a medium-sized branch and then contentedly sit down to chew on it. You have to provide a lot of hard chew toys for them or they will chew down the entire house. We discovered that deer legs are the odds-on favorite for this (but the zerOs will never be able to provide that sort of chew toy!). It is not a behavior issue, it is hard-wired and natural for some breeds.
You do not expect to take a working breed and turn it into a lap dog without a lot of training. Bo needs something to do which will satisfy his drive for productive work. For our boy, it is being the official announcer, greeter and escort of clients and visitors. He also needs to be bonded with his pack and to understand that he is a beloved omega, with the rest of the pack as Alphas, sub-Alphas or packmates. In our case (our baby is now 9 and is also named Bo, for Hobo Lobo, because he looks wolf-like and just showed up), it took several daily sessions of 10-15 minutes each (he has a short attention span) of Puppy Kindergarten interspersed with lots of play, lots of leash walks, lots of unleashed hikes away from the road, chances to swim supervised in the river, etc to turn him into an acceptable member of the pack. It took about 6 weeks to accomplish this, as he is quite independent and stubborn. It also took a lot of love.
This dog has issues and the zerOs need to find out what they are and deal with them creatively. However, I expect that, instead, Bo will be returned again.
But I sure would start by trying a crate with a PWD puppy. And given that it's already had six months of obedience training, odds are it's already been crate trained.
With Labs I'm fortunate that their driving force is not independence but a tremendous desire to please. Even my wild young field dog wants to make me happy -- she just gets a little too exuberant about it as a general rule.
The judge in her last hunt test said that he knew she was a live wire when she got thirty feet of air from a sitting start on the water blind . . . . unfortunately she broke at the water double and didn't pass, but that's life. We knew she was a pistol when we got her!