Born to Bark (19 page)

Using the umbilical leash indoors was not completely free of momentary difficulties. One day when I was not paying really close attention to Flint while I was working on the computer, I needed something from my bookshelf and stood up to walk across the room to get it. As I said “Flint,” he looked up in time to watch me topple over onto my face. I had not noticed that he had looped the leash around my ankles. I managed to avoid falling on my puppy as I hit the floor and suffered no permanent damage.

Another time, I had to change out of the light cotton work pants that I wear when writing and into some more respectable clothing because some visiting colleagues, whom I knew only professionally and wanted to get to know better, were coming for dinner. When I slipped into the bedroom to dress, I forgot to unclip Flint’s umbilical. When the doorbell rang, Flint dashed out of the half-closed door to the bedroom to investigate, dragging my trousers behind him. Flint arrived at the front door at the exact moment that Joan opened it to formally greet our guests. Their first view
of my home was of my beloved Joan standing next to a little gray dog attached to a pair of my pants. My two colleagues broke into an amused smile at the sight—Joannie did not.

In many homes house-training a pup is a major issue. The top three reasons that dogs are given up to shelters or abandoned are (in order): aggression, noisy barking, and soiling the house. Before she moved in with me, Joan had lived mainly with dogs that were kept outside, so her tolerance for indoor “accidents” was low. Certainly, paper training was out, since she wanted no evidence in the house that my dog even owned a rear end.

There are many ways to house-train a pup. Actually the easiest is to already own an adult dog that is house-clean and knows the routine. The puppy observes the adult dog’s activities and in only a couple of weeks you have a pup that never soils indoors. Obviously, that solution would not help me now.

The traditional method of house-training involves establishing a routine and paying attention to time. Puppies don’t have full control over their sphincter muscles until they are 5 or 6 months of age, but certain things predict when they need to pee or poop. Eating or drinking starts a wave of rhythmic contractions along the length of the digestive tract that results in elimination. Waking up from a nap and becoming active also triggers this
response, and a bout of vigorous play can do it as well. Within 5 to 15 minutes after each meal, nap, or round of playing, you can predict that the pup will need to empty its bowels or bladder. So the direct method of house-training involves taking the puppy outside a few minutes after each of these events.

To simplify the house-training process, I use a kennel crate. Dogs and their wild predecessors, like wolves, are den animals. In the wild, canines are born in a den, a small confined space, or a burrow. The pups enter the world already equipped with the instinct to keep their den and sleeping area clean. If they cannot leave their den, they will instinctively try to avoid relieving themselves until they can. This den instinct is the reason dogs can be house-trained, while cows and horses cannot. Ultimately, the dog comes to view the whole house as part of his den that must be kept
clean. Usually, dogs will generalize this to include all indoor areas, whether your home or someone else’s. Before that happens, however, it is extremely helpful to provide the pup with an artificial den, and that is a kennel crate.

The value of the crate is that when you can’t keep an eye on your pup, such as when you are sleeping or out of the house for a few hours, you can leave the puppy in his crate. If he views the crate as a den and his sleeping area, then his instincts will cause him to try not to mess in the area. Your dog should be comfortable in the kennel so that he considers it a sort of nest.

I placed Flint’s kennel crate beside my bed so that he could see me and hear me breathing, which is reassuring to young dogs. A bath towel on the floor of the crate made it comfortable and was also easily washed in case of an accident. To make the kennel crate a pleasant place for the puppy, I gave him a treat each time I put him into it. A 3- or 4-month-old pup should sleep cleanly through a 7- or 8-hour night. A younger one, like Flint, will start to fidget or whimper when he feels he can no longer hold it, and I expected that those sounds would wake me in time to get him o
ut of the crate and outside.

Flint’s crate—his den and his sleeping area
.

The size of the crate is also important. The kennel needs be large enough so that the dog can stand up in it and turn around easily. But a kennel crate that is the proper size for an adult dog will probably be too large to be effective for a puppy, because the pup can sleep in one end and eliminate at the other end and still believe that he is keeping his den clean. For this reason, I blocked off part of Flint’s kennel by putting a cardboard box in the back half to temporarily make the space smaller.

Joan was not familiar with this method of house-training or with the idea of using kennel crates indoors. She observed, “First, you leash your dog in the house, then you cage him, and then—just to make sure that he knows that he’s caged—you take away half of his floor space. Maybe you should have gotten
a parakeet, rather than a dog. How long does this caging thing go on?” she asked.

“Maybe until he is around 6 months old. At least he should be in his kennel when we go to bed. After that, we can leave the door to the crate open and see if he is clean overnight.”

I could see that she was not buying into my reasoning, but she let the matter go with what would become a frequent refrain: “Well, he’s your dog …”

As is often the case with shaping behaviors, there were a few glitches.

That first night I placed Flint in his crate next to my bed, I added a second towel next to the one he rested on, one that I had rubbed over his mother when we had picked him up. I had kept it in a plastic bag to hold her familiar scent. Before I crated Flint, I wrapped that scented towel around a windup alarm clock whose ticking would mimic the sound of the heartbeats of his mother and littermates to help him adjust to being away from his litter.

My preparations seemed to have worked, since Flint slept soundly and only began to stir at around 5
A.M
. I got up and opened his crate. The towels were dry, so I attached the leash to his collar in order to walk him to the back door. Bad move. Flint took fewer than 10 steps, then squatted on the bedroom rug and left deposits of both types before what was happening had registered in my sleepy brain. I grabbed the still damp pup and rushed him outside to the place that I still hoped he would learn to use for elimination, but it was already too late.

A short time afterward, I was on my knees with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of white vinegar cleaning up the mess. It is important to kill the smell of urine quickly, because the pup will be attracted back to places that have that smell and
will ultimately decide that that particular location must be the toilet. I don’t know whether it was the noise that I was making or the smell of vinegar that awakened Joannie. She rolled over and looked at me.

“Dog mess?”

I grunted an agreement.

“Crate works well, huh?” she replied and turned back and dozed off again.

On the second morning with Flint, I operated on the assumption that walking him out to the backyard wouldn’t work until he was a bit older. So when I woke up I opened the crate. I tousled the pup for a moment to make sure that he was awake and would not be startled when I lifted him, then I picked him up to carry him outside. Another bad move. I was about 10 feet from the back door when I felt something warm and looked down to see the stream of yellow fluid running from the puppy in my arms down the front of my pajamas.

Sometimes psychologists fail to see the natural connections between correct theories and everyday activities. I knew that after a period of sleep or rest, any increase in activity would trigger elimination in the pup. I had simply forgotten that walking after a night’s sleep was activity and so was playing with the pup for a few moments before taking him out of the crate. So on the third morning I quietly took Flint from the crate, carried him out to the yard, and we had our first morning elimination outside, rather than on the rug or me.

Following the first success, Flint’s progress was fast. After a week he was sleeping until 6
A.M
. without fussing, and by the end of a month he was sleeping for 8 hours, allowing me the luxury of staying in bed until 7
A.M
. if I wanted to.