Surviving Puppyhood Dealing with puppy chewing

Dani Weinberg

“I’m too old for this,” I thought, wiping up yet another puppy piddle from the kitchen floor. Surely, puppies, like human infants, should be raised only by the young and healthy. On second thought, maybe even the young and healthy develop a few grey hairs in the process.

Ruby was our first puppy in over 7 years, and I was experiencing the all-too-common Return to Reality. I remembered our previous puppy as having been “easy.” Had I simply forgotten? Come to think of it, what about those two (or was it three) remote controls that had been eaten? And my prescription sunglasses? And what about our wonderful Oriental rug, a legacy from my mother, that had been chewed through in several places? And what about....and what about...and what about....The memories were beginning to flood in. I decided to sit down, have a cup of coffee (Ruby was zonked out in her crate), and think about my promised article for Forward.

We privileged few who are trainers live in a dream world. For a few hours every week, we teach puppy classes. We get to watch our little canine students grow, develop, and learn – and we get to send them home at the end of the hour. We hear all about their awful antics on the phone between classes. We patiently explain to their owners about developmental stages and how to manage them. We sometimes wonder why these owners seem so frantic and so inept at following our simple suggestions.

Puppy chewing on the furniture? No problem. Just make the furniture taste bad and offer puppy something delicious (and “appropriate”) to chew on instead. Puppy nipping at the heels of the children? No problem. Just teach the kids to stop acting like prey animals. Puppy yowling all night in his crate? No problem. Just ignore the “unwanted” behavior until it “extinguishes” (most of us, to our credit, actually say “stops”). And please do keep up with your training. It’s so important for puppy to learn to sit on cue.

It all makes perfect sense in theory. But what happens when one of us privileged few gets her own live-in, full-time, for-better-or-for-worse puppy? Shock,
delight, exhaustion, some new watchbands and eyeglass cases – and the incomparable experiencing of falling in love again.

I brought Ruby home when she was 7 weeks old. The very next day, I started her training. During the previous seven puppyless years, I’d learned a lot and had become quite a proficient clicker trainer and instructor. I now had an opportunity for firsthand experience with the techniques I had been teaching so many students. Experimenting on Ruby, I modified or simplified some of these techniques and raised my standards on others. For example, knowing that Ruby was headed for a brilliant career in Obedience, I knew I had to teach her Utility-quality behaviors right from the start. I was not willing to put in the time and energy later on to retrain a rocked-back Sit or a forward-folding Down. Clicker training made it easy to do it right the first time.

I also had my own private hands-on “seminar” in puppy individuality! For example, Ruby was so much more visual than auditory. She focused easily on hand signals as cues and took much longer to learn the verbal counterparts. Even now, at the age of 10 months, she’s just beginning to get the meaning of the verbal cue “Stand,” though she’s responded fluently to the visual cue for several months now.

I wish I had videotaped our first day of training. It was so easy and so much fun – a powerful confirmation of everything I had been telling my students about clicker training and about starting with baby puppies. On that first day, I spent just a couple of minutes conditioning the clicker and then started right in with teaching Sit. Since Ruby was offering Sit spontaneously, I didn't do any prompting but just caught the behavior with the clicker. I did have to prompt Down at first but very quickly stopped and just waited for her to offer it. For the next few weeks, I thoroughly enjoyed the relaxation of not introducing cues until I was absolutely sure I had the behavior in exactly the form I wanted. Once again, I experienced affirmation of my belief that the clicker really was an excellent communication and information device – much more powerful than the linguistic sounds we utter, thinking that somehow our dogs will understand what we mean by them.

In those first few weeks, I was also teaching a lot of basic household-manners skills, using eye-contact training as a foundation. Ruby quickly generalized the behavior to all permission-requesting situations (like getting out of the crate or going through a doorway). I clicker-trained her to use the dog door (which she could barely reach at first) so that she'd have quick and easy access to the outdoors for elimination. But I left nothing else to chance about her housetraining. This was probably the most grueling part of that first week or two for me. Being committed to accomplishing the housetraining quickly and completely, I knew that I had to be present to reinforce her every time she eliminated outdoors. Now, puppies do a lot of peeing! And they do it around the clock! Within a week, though, she was sleeping 5 to 6 hours every night. During the daytime, on the other hand, I found myself spending more and more time outdoors, balancing a cup of coffee on the arm of the lawn chair and watching her for that precious moment when I could say “Gooooood girl.”

By the time Ruby was 10 weeks old, she knew the following behaviors: a tuck Sit (on visual cue), a foldback Down (on visual cue), Eye Contact (on verbal cue), Leave It (from hand, on verbal cue), back-and-forth Recalls (moving among 2-3 people), the beginning of a Mark (as in Utility Gloves), stick and hand targeting (on verbal cue), the beginning of a Go Out (using targeting), and a few tricks (Spin, Roll Over, High Five). I tried to start loose-leash walking, but she was still too short, and I didn't want to present her with a distorted picture of my body posture.

She loved training from the very start. She seemed to think it was not work but play. It was clear that the more she learned, the more she was capable of learning. Very quickly – as soon as she knew a couple of behaviors – she began to offer behaviors spontaneously. And in no time at all, she became my teacher just as I was hers.

After extensive discussion with Ruby and with her permission, I offer the following :

Seven Rules of Puppy Training.

1. Remember: your puppy is perfect – and normal! With this as your starting point, everything else will fall into place.

2. Clear your calendar! If you train with positive methods, your puppy will be a training addict in no time! Your problem will be how to stop training because your puppy will think it's all play and will want to do it all the time.

3. Feel free to invent all kinds of new tricks and training techniques as you and your puppy build your relationship. Your puppy will teach you a lot – maybe even more than you'll teach your puppy!

4. Set yourself only short-term goals – and don't take those too seriously either. Puppies change, grow, develop before your very eyes, so what you thought you wanted to do or were doing at this moment will (and should) change in the next moment.

5. Take your time about introducing cues (beyond the cues that emerge naturally from any luring or prompting you do). Language isn't important to dogs anyway. And you'll become a better trainer if you immerse yourself in dog language. My motto is: “Think Small/Go Slow.”

6. When something goes wrong or doesn't seem to be working – forget it! It will all be different by tomorrow anyway (see Rule 3 above). Seriously, like many health problems, puppy behavior "problems" mostly resolve themselves, as long as we don't get in the way.

7. And, most important, have fun. They don't stay puppies nearly long enough, so enjoy them while you can.

Dani Weinberg
Albuquerque, New Mexico
daniw@earthlink.net