How to Raise the Perfect Dog (15 page)

“We started crate training the first day,” says Chris Komives, now a confirmed fan. “I bought a crate appropriate for an adult wheaten terrier and made a partition to give her an area appropriate to her size. For the first two weeks she was in either the crate or the backyard. I made sure the crate was associated with calmness and safety. At first she was anxious, and I would wait for her to be calm and then go sit with her. She learned that when she’s calm in her crate, I reappear. Soon she was quiet when left in her crate.”

Teaching your puppy to use a crate requires patience and repetition, but it is not difficult, as the puppy instinctually feels comfortable in a den. If you’ve adopted your puppy from a breeder like Brooke or Diana, you will already be well ahead of the game. Place the crate in the area that you have chosen for your puppy’s resting place. Make sure it is not an isolated area but one in which the puppy can still feel a part of the rest of the pack, even if she’s behind a baby gate in her crate. Diana likes her new owners to set up their crates in a corner of the family room, where the German shepherd puppies can share in family togetherness from a distance, but where they won’t be constantly distracted by too much activity or foot traffic.

Wherever you choose to place the crate (later you can move it from room to room if you like), take Brooke’s advice and use it as the number one destination for rewards or treats. Find a favorite toy or a snack or bully stick—whatever most motivates your puppy—and make the crate the place she is guaranteed to get it.

Begin this crating routine as soon as you bring your puppy home. Let your puppy play—supervised at all times, of course—then when she begins to tire, invite her into the crate and close her in for a half hour. Next time, make it an hour, then an hour and fifteen minutes, and so on. Never close the puppy in if she is excited or anxious, but if she becomes whiny later, ignore her; don’t inadvertently reward the behavior by trying to soothe her with your voice. Give her a firm “Tssst,” or the sound you choose to use as your “I disagree with that behavior” sound, wait until she calms down, then walk away and ignore. Always reward true calm submission in the crate with praise, petting, or treats. Do this at regular intervals throughout the day. Your goal is to build up to several hours of a peaceful, resting puppy. Having your puppy sleep in her crate facilitates this. After she is house-trained, she will be able to stay in her crate overnight for a full seven to nine hours.

CRATE-TRAINING SUCCESS STORY
Angel’s Night Out

My coauthor, Melissa Jo Peltier, can’t have a dog in her life right now, because she and her husband live in New York but travel back and forth to Los Angeles frequently for work. While we were working on this book, I offered her the chance to take Angel overnight to stay with them in their small short-term apartment near Universal Studios. Angel was just four months old and had never been away from his pack overnight before. As part of his learning program, I was curious to see how he would fare.

On a Friday afternoon, we put Angel in a midsize crate and seat-belted it tightly into the passenger seat of Melissa’s small convertible. I showed Melissa how to let Angel go into the crate on his own, following a bully stick with his nose. I also provided him a towel with the scent of “home,” and she put in a couple of her socks as well, so he could get used to her scent (he already knew her as a regular visitor to the pack). “The moment the car pulled out of Cesar’s driveway, Angel looked at me for reassurance, then lay down in his crate and promptly went to sleep,” Melissa reported. “He snoozed all the way—despite the stop-and-go rush-hour traffic and the deafening freeway noise, all the more distracting in a convertible with the top down. He only started to rouse himself after I had already exited the freeway and was about half a block from our destination. I believe he was that sensitive to my energy, even though he’d never been where we were going before.”

Melissa and her husband spent a delightful evening playing with Angel, taking him to an outdoor café (his first!) while they ate dinner, giving him one long and two short walks on Ventura Boulevard and in a nearby park, and making sure he eliminated right on schedule. “He spent the latter half of the evening getting some decadent belly rubs on the couch while we watched a DVD,” Melissa told me. Still, I was a little unsure about how he’d handle his first real sleepaway experience. He was only four months old and had thus far never experienced any traumatic nights, thanks to Brooke’s early crate training and, of course, to the comforting presence of the other dogs in my pack. But he was used to sleeping in the same crate as his adopted brother, Mr. President, every single night. How would he fare, all alone in an alien environment, with two complete strangers?

It turns out that Angel was an Angel, even away from home. Melissa reported:

I took him for one last walk outside so he could relieve himself, and did a very short but fast-paced sprint with him to help tire him out. It had been a big day anyway, so when it came time to go to bed, I placed the crate in a corner of the bedroom where I could watch it, and invited Angel in with his bully stick. He was really ready to crash by that time. The crate obviously represented relaxation to him, and he lay right down and started chewing quietly. When I was sure he was relaxed, I closed the door, and we got ready for bed ourselves. Cesar had told me he was worried that Angel might whine if he woke up during the night, but he uttered not a peep. When I opened my eyes in the morning, he was standing up in his crate trying to make eye contact with me, obviously ready to go out, but not at all anxious about it… just patiently waiting for me to come get him. It was so sweet! He didn’t have a single accident, was enthusiastic during our morning walk, and when it was time to bring him back to Cesar’s, he climbed right back in the crate and let me lift it into the car. Once again, he napped through the whole commute.

Angel’s “night out” illustrates how incredibly beneficial crate training can be for a dog’s well-being, helping him become adaptable to all sorts of new circumstances and opening up the possibilities of a life full of exciting adventures. I was very proud of Angel—and of Melissa, for reinforcing all his good lessons up to that point.

YARD RULES

If you are planning to let your puppy out in your yard, make sure it’s been puppy-proofed, and always begin by supervising. If you are going to use a dog door and make the yard a part of the space in which she’s allowed free rein, make sure—especially if it’s a large yard—that you start her off by containing her in a small part of it. Set up a gate between your yard and side yard, establish a yard pen, or hook up a dog run. The backyard is not supposed to be Chuck E. Cheese, where anything and everything goes. If a puppy has no structure in her backyard wanderings, letting her ramble around your property just because it makes you feel better will actually add stress to her life. She will be like a ship without a rudder, and instead of signifying freedom, the yard will begin to feel like a prison. Never leave your very young pup out in the yard unattended. The outdoor pen and indoor crate or confined, safe area should become the babysitters for your pup.

“There are just so many advantages to confining your young puppy to a side yard, dog run, or penned-off area,” says Diana Foster. “It prevents destructive behavior to the rest of the yard; it reduces territorial aggression; it cuts down on the stress caused by overstimulation, which in turn leads to arousal and barking; it reduces the excitement of jumping on people and annoying visitors; and it keeps your yard cleaner. How can anyone argue with that?”

DRAMA-FREE HOUSEBREAKING

“I think people still have a huge misconception about how to house-train a puppy,” says Dr. Paula Terifaj of Founders Veterinary Clinic in Brea, California. “They still use punishment or yelling. Puppies do not understand you, no matter how much you yell or swat at them. Consistency is the best way to house-break a puppy. Get a potty schedule going and the puppy will eventually get with the program.”

“I don’t understand what the fuss about housebreaking is all about,” Brooke Walker muses. “By the time my puppies are ten weeks old, they are all totally housebroken. My clients call me and say, ‘My dog has never had an accident inside the house.’ I can house-break any dog in three days.”

Like Brooke and Dr. Terifaj, I also have never been able to comprehend all the high drama that people tend to associate with house-breaking a puppy. The truth is, this is a situation in which you have Mother Nature working with you right from the start. When the puppies are first born, they eat and they relieve themselves inside the den, but the mother always cleans them. The mother stimulates their bodily functions, and her environment always remains unsoiled. There is never the scent of urine or feces where the puppies eat, sleep, and live. When they get old enough to follow the mother outside, they imitate her example and quickly learn to relieve themselves in the flora and fauna on the outskirts of their general living area. In this way, all dogs become conditioned never to eliminate in their dens or near the places where they eat and sleep. From two to four months of age, most pups pick up on the concept of housebreaking quite easily, since it is a part of their natural programming.

Of course, this doesn’t always apply to puppies that were raised in puppy mills. Dogs in puppy mills often wallow in their own waste twenty-four hours a day, and even though it is naturally abhorrent to them, it becomes the only thing they know. By the time you bring a puppy mill puppy home, the trauma of its neonatal period may have effectively canceled out many of its natural instincts. This is true of Georgia Peaches, the rescued puppy mill Yorkie in my pack. Her formative months were so miserable, so unnatural, that her common sense in many areas seems to have vanished. I have rehabilitated her to the point where she’s about 80 percent consistent, but she’s the only one in the pack who has regular accidents. The new puppies all got the hang of our bathroom schedule within a week or two of arriving at my house.

Another built-in plus when it comes to housebreaking is your puppy’s digestive tract, which is extremely quick and efficient. You can set your watch to it. Five to thirty minutes after a puppy eats, she’ll want to defecate. From the time you get your puppy until she’s about eight months old, you should be feeding her three times a day. I recommend that you keep to a very consistent feeding schedule and that you take your puppy outside immediately after eating and also right after naps, long confinements or trips, or extended play sessions so that it becomes her pattern.

When bringing your puppy outside after a meal, take her to an outdoor area where there’s dirt, grass, sand, rocks—some sort of natural surface that will stimulate the instinctual side of a puppy’s brain to look for a place to relieve herself. “By the time they leave my house,” Brooke states, “my puppies have learned how to defecate on grass, on dirt, on concrete, on brick, and on stone. That way, they are more adaptable when their owners take them places. Some people make the mistake of only potty-training their pups on one type of surface, so if they find themselves in another situation, the puppies don’t know what to do.”

In the early days of housebreaking, you also want to make sure that the puppy has a place to relieve herself where she feels safe, a place that seems and smells familiar. For a puppy’s digestion to be regular, she should feel totally relaxed when she relieves herself. If a dog is panicked, nervous, unsure, or insecure, she will shut down and not be able to eliminate.

As always, remember that your own energy is a big factor in your housebreaking efforts. If you are feeling nervous or impatient or are trying to rush a puppy to relieve herself, that can also stress her out and stop her down. When new owners call for advice on housebreaking their German shepherd puppies, Diana Foster always asks them to check their own energy and behavior, to make sure they are not the ones putting the drama into the housebreaking experience. “You take him out there. You’re all excited. You’re talking in a high squeaky voice, ‘Go potty for Mommy. Go potty—Mommy loves you!’ The dog is running around, all excited, and looking at the person, wondering, ‘What is she trying to say to me?’ You’re distracting the dog so much, he can’t relax. Then you think he doesn’t have to go because he’s not going, so you bring him in, and then he pees on the carpet. And the drama starts all over again.” If this is your pattern, Diana recommends that you go back inside the house and, if you have a closed yard, leave the dog for fifteen or twenty minutes or wander ten or fifteen feet away, to give him a chance to relax.

While in the early stages of housebreaking, also make sure you’re not just rushing outside, letting your puppy go, then rushing back inside. For most dogs, just spending time outside is a reward in itself. If your dog associates holding in her bodily functions with the reward of a game or a walk outside, it will be more motivation for her to practice that self-control.

And then there’s praise. “Praising your puppy when he does his business is very important,” Brooke Walker says, and I agree. Praise doesn’t have to be a big, loud celebration—it can simply be your quiet approval. Your dog picks up on the positive energy in your pleased and satisfied silence, which can be a much more powerful way of communicating with her than screaming “Good girl!”

Treats can also be a way of rewarding good bathroom behavior, though I recommend that you wean your puppy off them once regular patterns have been established. That’s what I advised Crystal Reel to do when she took Mr. President home with her. “Cesar told me that Mr. President was very food driven so I should use that when reinforcing good housebreaking behavior. So while Mr. President was with me I made sure to have a few of Cesar’s Discipline Organic Dog Treats with Organic Beef on hand at all times. In the beginning, whenever Mr. P. would go poo or pee outside, I would praise him with a treat and my positive vibes. After a while I reduced the treats so he was just feeling my happy energy whenever he went potty outside.”