the grills

My dog doesn't go near my stuff either.

Unfortunately, kids and others milling about the house can be harder to train I've found.

Plus, accidents do happen......

I always leave all my grilles on.

For best sound, listen both ways and decide which you like better.

Grills help protect often delicate drivers. If you have delicate drivers,like soft dome tweeters say, and kids or pets or house cleaners or such running about, I'd leave them on and do something else relatively cheap and easy to tweak the sound if really necessary, like tweaking placement, toeing in/out, interconnects, even (gasp) tone controls if available etc.

My cats used to use the exposed label edge of my stored records as a scratching post. The sleeves took a beating but the contents survived luckily.