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Tag Archives: puppies

Potty Training: NO MORE EXCUSES

11 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, From The Owlery

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

anxiety, biting the bullet, excuses, house breaking, parenting, potty training, puppies, toddler, trying new things

Since this is the long weekend, we have decided to take advantage of three days off to bite the bullet and try potty training.

I’ve spent the last few months reading The No Cry Potty Training Solution, and asking every single parent I know for advice.

My mother has no advice, since I was potty trained by my aunt. I asked her for advice before she died and she said she had just made a big fuss over me – apparently for weeks afterwards whenever I used the potty I would ask “Auntie Helen happy??”

Not Mary Poppins over at Daycare Daze lays out her Smartie method, which she has been using with great success for decades.

Hannah from Hodgepodge And Strawberries has also blogged about potty training, and vehemently expressed her distaste of pull-ups to me over Twitter.

@IfByYesTweets no worries. i have OPINIONS about potty training. i've trained, lemme see, five kids now. PullUps are bollocks.

— Hannah (@hpstrawberries) November 9, 2012

And we’ve spent the last couple of months getting Owl accustomed to sitting on the potty (both a small potty and a potty seat on our toilet) while reading stories.

Once, while running around with no diaper on, he started to pee so we sent him to the potty where he deliberately finished the pee to great acclaim, and he was so encouraged that he did it again a few minutes later.

Our excuses for not potty training him properly were wearing thin.

Ultimately, I was afraid of failure, and afraid of change. I have anxiety issues. Change scares me. Doing something I’ve never done before scares me.

Then I had an epiphany.

I was called to a man’s house to help him deal with his new puppy. He was red-eyed with sleeplessness, and shack-wacky for spending three consecutive days holding his puppy. Every time he put his puppy down the puppy would pee or poop, and he was so anxious over messing up his dog’s house training that he was driving himself insane.

Even though this is the best kind of owner – 100% dedicated to starting his puppy out right – he was thinking of returning the puppy for the sake of his own sanity.

So I stepped in and made him put the puppy down, and as I talked him through the process of interrupting the behavior, moving the puppy to the correct spot, and then rewarding things when done correctly I realized…

…I have TOO potty trained before.

And Beloved Dog was challenging to potty train.

If I could train Beloved Dog, if I knew the steps well enough to walk someone through it and be paid for doing so (he kept the puppy, who is doing much better, and signed on for six more sessions), then I could potty train a toddler.

So I went out and bought stickers and smarties, bristol board for a (very crude)  reward chart, and training pants.

Let’s DO THIS THING.

Happy Canada Day! I have poop and anxiety.

01 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, Life and Love

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

babies, crate training, dogs, puppies

I saw my shrink yesterday and told her how bad my anxiety is getting. She feels (as do I) that a certain amount is to be expected what with all of the uncertainty around finding a job, committing to a daycare, and so on.

She also seems to be of the opinion that I need to stop forgetting to take my meds. She may have a point.

All I know is, the anxiety bleeds to other areas of my life. I’ve gotten involved with a new service dog school that desperately needs my help, mostly because none of the “trainers” are in any way formally trained. I’m supposed to be helping my friend with her new dog (who is in desperate need of work in most areas, from obedience to skills) and I’m happy to do so, but knowing that I am supposed to be going out with her, rather than staying in my little hamster cage, causes me huge amounts of stress.

Then I agreed to take this dang puppy.

The school is in desperate need of puppy raisers, and right now they have three puppies without a home. They have a potential raiser for a lovely blue merle collie pup, but that raiser has only dealt with puppies from my old school, who came to her partially trained already. They wanted me to take this dog for a month or two and teach her that stuff, so this woman can get a dog at the stage she is used to.

I thought about it and said no.

a) I’m supposed to be helping my friend with her dog, and it’s hard to do that AND train a puppy at the same time

b) The job search and everything adds enough disruption to my life

c) PH was not huge on the idea.

So then they begged me to take her for just a month. Then just a couple of weeks.

When they hit “one week” I broke down and agreed.

The puppy arrived yesterday and I’m already regretting it.

It’s not that she’s a bad dog. She’s lovely, and considering that she’s not even four months old she’s quite well behaved, really. Beloved Dog was not nearly this well behaved at this age. Plus, she has the same birthday as Beloved Dog! You’d think this would serve to bond them, but he’s eyeing her malevolently.

Trying to deal with a puppy while dealing with a baby is… formidable.

I ended up locking her in her crate yesterday because I couldn’t handle trying to put my baby down to nap while the puppy roared around the room. This morning PH found himself trying to keep Babby from removing the caps on our electrical outlets while trying to clean up a massive dog crap on our living room floor.

This is the third “mistake” she has made since she arrived, and it’s awful.

She seems to have the idea about going outside to pee, but the THREE times she has pooped in the house have been RIGHT after PH or I brought her back in from outside. She waits until you turn your back for not even a second and lets fly, and these are big, stanking, soft poops. She’s eating one of those crappy “all natural” “for all life stages” diets and you can tell it’s bad because the poops are god-awful. If your dog’s poops make you want to die just because you caught a whiff of them the food needs to be changed.

I could take all of this in stride if I weren’t trying to watch an active, crawling baby at the same time. She’s spending a lot of time in her crate because I just don’t have the time to deal with her, when I’m supposed to be training her.

Anxiety. Anxiety. Anxiety. 

Anyway, we’re going to a local park this afternoon to take in some Canada Day festivities. I’ll bring the puppy. Maybe I’ll be able to train her to know EVERYTHING in a couple of days and I can get rid of her…

 

Because I know dogs better than babies…

04 Monday Apr 2011

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, How is Babby Formed?

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

babies, dogs, object exchange, puppies, resource guarding, training

So, for the last month at least, Babby has begun to object when we take stuff away from him. It isn’t all the time. Usually he’s pretty good about it. But sometimes he has his hands on something really interesting but totally inappropriate, and when I take it away from him, he sets up a protesting wail.

Now, when puppies start doing this, it’s time to start on the object exchanges.

The idea behind object exchange is that you need to take things away from your puppy a lot, and either give the object back or replace it with another, better object. This way, when you take something away, your dog doesn’t think it is the end of the universe. He knows that you’re just borrowing the object and if he waits patiently, he’ll get a lot of praise and then get his object returned. Or, if the object isn’t returned, he’ll probably get a treat or another toy in recompense. Besides, he’s learned that he doesn’t have a lot of choice in the matter anyway, so he might as well give up now and accept his reward.

Once you have established this mindset, it is much easier to reclaim your shoe/sock/underwear/dead bird from your dog’s ravenous maw. Often the dog will happily deliver the taboo item right to your hand (although that’s not what you want in the case of a dead bird).

So that’s what I’ve begun to do with Babby.

I felt the best place to start object exchanges would be with his plastic bucket o’ shapes, which is probably full of phthalates. They are low value (because there are lots of them and duplicates of each shape) and easily swapped (you can exchange a red triangle for a green square).

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

So every day, when he’s banging stars and circles together, I say “give that to Mommy!” and reach out for one of the shapes. At first I was mostly prying them out of his chubby little fingers, but now he’s getting the idea and he’s starting to actively try to deliver the shape to my hand. He misses a lot, but it’s the thought that counts.

When I have the shape in my hand, I sign “thank you” while saying in an exhuberant voice “THANK you!”. Then I either hand it back or offer him another shape, which I deliver with a happy “you’re welcome!”.

He thought this was fascinating at first, and for a while he was handing back the shape as fast as I could give it to him, just to watch me do my excited pantomime again. Now it’s beginning to bore him, so he’ll often just hand me the shape and go back to playing, without even waiting to get a shape in return.

That means it’s working.

Soon I will move on to reclaiming higher value items, such as toys and maybe even, someday, his food.

The goal is that when he’s a toddler, and I find him clutching a knife/used tampon/bottle of poison/dead bird, I’ll be able to say “give it to Mommy!” and have him deliver it happily.

It works with dogs, anyway.

My First Reality Check, Part the 2nd

17 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, Life and Love

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

behaviour, buster cube, dog training, dogs, learning, parenthood, puppies, puzzles, reality check, tricky treat balls

So, on day five of being a puppy parent, I had a break down. I started wailing uncontrollably in the garden.

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH HIM?? WHY WON’T HE JUST PEE?? PEEEE, DAMN YOU! PEEEEEEEE!”.

My boyfriend of the time, who was visiting for the weekend, was like “Whoa. Okay.” He told me to go upstairs and go to sleep. He would take care of the puppy overnight. I was to sleep. Just sleep. The puppy went in the spare room with my boyfriend and I slept the sleep of the dead.

Things looked better in the morning.

I can has Smokey?

Over the next couple of weeks, I began to get the hang of it. He started sleeping for longer periods in the night time, and I discovered that he loved eating slices of Smokey cheese-stuffed sausages. Within a weekend he had started to pick up that peeing in the garden resulted in a slice of smokey, whereas peeing on the carpet resulted in a lot of nothing.

That was the real turning point.

Soon he was peeing eagerly to receive sausage, and I began to focus on putting it on command, and getting him to tell me when he wanted out. My mother and I looked everywhere for a set of jingle bells to hang on the door knob for him to jangle, but could find no such thing (in Vancouver, Land of Granola-Eating Pet People, you can find exactly that in many pet stores. I was not in Vancouver).

So I decided that if I could train a rat to press a lever, I could train a puppy to push a button. We bought one of those battery operated doorbells with the wireless doorbell button. We stuck the ringer in the kitchen, and the button by the back door. I spent a long time smearing peanut butter on that button, and clicking him for going near it and licking/nudging/sniffing the thing.

There was the slight issue that my puppy didn’t learn as fast as a rat. He was only nine weeks old, after all.

But while I often felt frustrated (and so did he – he would start barking in impatience, unable to figure out what I wanted), I knew I could do this. My self-confidence, thanks to The Great Smokey Breakthrough of ’04, was restored and even if my expectations were still sky-high, my schedule was more relaxed and realistic. I accepted that he might not learn this quickly. I accepted that it might take, quite frankly, for FRICKING EVER. But I knew that some day, my dog would ring a doorbell when he needed to go outside.

How to escape??

Whenever the bumbling efforts resulted in an actual ring from the bell, I immediately threw open the door and led a wild romp outside, to his great delight. It still took him a long time to figure out the connection, and even longer to figure out how to set it off. Nowadays, I could teach him this same trick in under ten minutes. But he was younger and stupider back then.

I was rewarded when he was 12 weeks old. I had left him with my mother for a few days to visit my boyfriend in Newfoundland, where he was getting his B.Ed. I called home to check on my furry baby, and as my mother was giving me an update, an unmistakable sound ding-donged in the background. My puppy had rung the doorbell. Mum immediately got off the phone and took him outside and I did a dance around the room.

From then on, things were a lot easier. The sound of that ringing doorbell had us all jumping to action, but the number of mistakes in the house declined remarkably. When I moved into my new apartment at the end of the summer, my dog was five and a half months old and pretty much housebroken. With the exception of illness (like the Ice Cream Incident), I can only think of two or three mistakes he made in the new place. But boy did I rely on that doorbell. My Beloved Dog hasn’t used that doorbell in years. Now he waits patiently until I decide to take him outside, even if I don’t get around to it until two in the afternoon (IRON BLADDER!). But that first year, it was a godsend.

I spent that year constantly following him around the house, and rewarding/punishing as necessary every single thing he did – and he never stopped moving. I never dared leave him for more than three or four hours at a time, and then only in a crate. We had to get sitters for him if we wanted a night out.

Meet Mr. Squeaky

I discovered the joy of squeaky toys – because when I could hear that squeaky toy, I knew what he was doing. That meant that so long as I could hear that high pitched incessant squeaking from the next room, I could actually take my eyes off of him, sit down and do something else for a few minutes. I could actually check my email, or read a book for five, maybe even ten minutes at a time!  I grew to love that ear piercing squeal. It was the sound of being able to sit down and rest.

I initiated a routine that involved a long walk with stick-fetching if he pooped by a certain point, and an abbreviated walk if he had not pooped by the time we reached that point. He learned quickly that Poo is Worth It.

He was my pride and joy, and the bane of my existence all at once. But really, I loved my enslavement. I loved that my training was working. I had forgiven myself for thinking that I could do in a few days what actually takes weeks and months to accomplish, and for thinking the speed of his learning curve reflected on my abilities. The important thing was that I could accomplish it, and that this pain in the ass, this constantly moving, chewing, romping ball of fluff was actually learning.

My baby had a brain

He came when called, he left things when I told him to, he peed and pooed on command. He could do sit, down and stand-stays. He could play dead. He could fetch. He could play tug. He obeyed hand signals. He dropped things that I told him to drop, and gleefully grabbed things to keep away from me when I said “I’m going to get you!” and yes, he rang a doorbell with his nose when he needed to go outside.

I was learning, too. With the arrival of Mr. Squeaky, I discovered the joy of Knowing He Was Occupied. I became highly skilled at keeping the puppy busy.

Possibly the best gift my dog ever received was from Perfect Husband, who was simply Adoring Best Friend Living in Vancouver And Worshipping Me From Afar at the time. He came to visit me for Christmas and brought a Buster Cube as an offering to my new fur baby. I had already begun to rely on Tricky Treat Balls to feed and occupy my ever-busy puppy, and the Buster Cube took food puzzles to a college level. Six years later, we still fill that same puzzle for him on a daily basis. No food bowls for this dog; not since he was seven months old. He works for every single kibble and it keeps him busy when we leave the house. Buster Cube = GOD SEND.

Big and Handsome

Then, at one year old, he grew up. It was sudden. Over a matter of a month or two he went from a spazzy freak to a calm, obedient, and reliable dog. Since then he has hardly ever caused me a moment’s grief, unless you count the occasional copious diarrhea incident. He’s a good boy, who lies quietly in whatever room I am inhabiting and waits patiently for food, walkies, and anything else I deign to give him.

Still high in my priorities

In a strange way, I miss his youth. He’s too easy now, and too easy to list lower in my priorities. I suffer guilt when I realize that it’s nearly three and he hasn’t been on his walk yet; when I realize his cube has been empty all day; when I realize that Mr. Squeaky has been in a bag in the pantry for over a year. Part of me misses the days when my world revolved around him… because part of me revelled in being so wrapped up in another creature. I still love him. I love him more, probably, than when he demanded every minute of my every day.

But part of me misses the days when he was a furry toddler leaving destruction in his wake, needing my constant supervision and guidance. Now… he’s all grown up.

Warning: This video is rated C for Cuteness. Uncontrollable “squee” noises may result.

My First Reality Check, Part I

15 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

book learning, dogs, expectations, parenthood, puppies, reality check

They say that no matter what you do, nothing will prepare you for the reality of having a child.

I believe them.

In 2004, I was desperate for a dog. My first dog had died when I was in Junior High, and my recently-retired parents didn’t want to be burdened with another. Now I was graduating university and finally in a position to own and care for my own puppy. How can you be a dog trainer if you haven’t owned a dog in your adult life? Would you hire a dog trainer who hadn’t owned a dog in 10 years?

5 weeks

My longing for a puppy was deep and desperate. Checking out good Sheltie breeders, I found a litter that was perfect – exactly what I was looking for – but already born and all spoken for. I wept and wept over those pictures, spilling bitter tears of heartbreak. Yet one of those puppies was to become my Beloved Dog.

“I know were were talking about upcoming litters,” the breeder said to me over the phone, “but I was wondering if you’d be interested in the bi-blue boy from this current litter. He… reminds me a lot of his mother, who is my favourite dog. But right now he’s lined up for a very elderly couple, and… I think this pup would do better in a “performance” home…”

I jumped at the puppy. I knew it would be a challenge. This was a puppy who the breeder felt would be too difficult for a settled and elderly couple. Who better to take him on than an aspiring dog trainer with a diploma in behaviour modification?

Just a blur

When we went to go meet him, the litter jumped all over me except for this one, who roamed obsessively around the room as if unable to keep still. Twenty minutes later, the 6 week old pups were slumbering deeply. But not the bi-blue boy. No, he was still roaring around. He was roaring around a good hour later, when we left.

But, I had read the books! I knew I could handle this puppy. The Culture Clash was my Bible and I read and re-read it obsessively until I knew it by heart. I read Don’t Shoot The Dog, which summarized what I already knew about operant conditioning. I bought a crate and kongs and clickers, spent hours choosing the perfect name, and told everyone my plans for training the heck out of him.

The first week was terrible.

The books all say that puppies that age spend most of their time sleeping. I have since found out that the books are right… about most puppies. But nooooooo. Not MY puppy. We brought that puppy home and he didn’t sleep for 13 hours. He tore around unstoppably for hours and hours, not collapsing into sleep until we physically restrained him in a tight embrace at midnight.  He would also stop to dig at the carpet obsessively every few feet. I thought there might be something wrong with his brain.

The books made it sound like puppies constantly piddle everywhere. I have since found out that the books are right… about most puppies. But nooooooo. Not MY puppy. We joked about making his pedigree name “Iron Bladder” because he would go for hours and hours without toileting. The books said to take him outside every hour or two for a potty break so he would develop good habits. The books didn’t say what to do when it’s the end of April in Nova Scotia, and four in the morning, and you’ve been standing outside shivering for forty five minutes, covered in dew, waiting for your puppy to pee. And then, when you admit defeat and bring him in to get warm because the poor thing is soaked and shivering, he does what the books say you should never allow to happen, and pees right there on the floor.

It was around day 5 that I cracked.

Part of it was the sleep deprivation. I was getting up diligently in the night, every two or three hours, to take my little Iron Bladder outside for what my father referred to as “evening constitutionals”.

The rest of it was high expectations. I wasn’t prepared to get a puppy who hadn’t read the books. I wasn’t prepared for the books to let me down. I had expected to be awesome, and now I felt like I was messing everything up. When my puppy wouldn’t take the high value treats I offered him, I despaired that this un-motivated puppy would never be the dog I wanted. When my puppy pooped on the floor for the third time in a row, I felt sure that he would never be properly house trained, because he was picking up bad habits and I was failing him as a trainer. When my puppy preferred digging at the rug over interacting with me, I was sure that we would never bond.

Don't let the innocent look fool you.

I felt helpless. I felt frustrated. I felt like a failure.

Every mistake I made felt like a knell of doom; one that would have lasting repercussions forever.

I felt bogged down by this woolly little nightmare who was nothing that I had ever imagined.

All the books in the world had not prepared me for the reality of this puppy.

 

 

 

Next: My First Reality Check, Part the 2nd.

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