animals

Bomb-proof: Not easily frightened, able to calmly deal with new situations and stimuli, won’t go through screen doors when the UPS guy arrives.

In the first part of this series I wrote about picking a puppy that was a match for your lifestyle and how important the breeder was.

This column is about when you bring the puppy home—now what?

My obsession is training our dogs to be bomb-proof—dogs who sit, observe and calmly watch the world go by.

We have a long, long way to go. I learned too late the skills needed to train a calm dog, and thus have spent the last years chasing our Berners down roads, over fields and profusely apologizing as they jump through the car windows of strangers.

Our dogs are past the best canine learning age—that first year of puppyhood—so I consider them remedial learners. But against all odds, we are making progress.

I’ve been taking the sage advice of Joey Padilla of Santa Fe Tails and Jill Felice of Assistance Dogs of the West.

The two big ideas I’ve taken from them are lots of exposure and “let the treats fall from heaven.”

Here is a simple principle: the more of the world that puppies are exposed to early, the calmer they will be later. The critical brain developmental time for a dog is those first few months. For comparison, human brains seem to continue to develop until the early twenties, when a child finally gets that, just because there are checks in the checkbook doesn’t mean that there is money in the checking account. (“Wait, what?” is their normal reaction.)

Back to puppies. From the day you bring a puppy home, it’s a hands-on job of exposing them to you and a new environment. They need to be regularly and gently handled in all circumstances. As a kid, I freaked out when our ten-week-old German Shepherd growled when I started to pet her while she ate. My mom made me sit with her and continue petting her until she realized I wasn’t going to take her food. I was a little sensitive about this because that same year I had reached for my friend’s French fries and was stabbed in the hand with a fork.

There is a debate within the veterinarian community about when a puppy’s immune system is strong enough for exposure to the bigger world. But as soon as possible it’s crucial to expose them to all the things that cause consternation. Kids: puppies are suspicious of little humans. Other dogs: dogs are hierarchical and social pack animals. You want to keep your puppy safe, but it’s crucial that they learn how to interact with other dogs. And it’s best that this interaction is off-leash so they can follow the time-honored rituals of canine meet and greet. Also, guys with beards and hats: apparently dogs haven’t accepted the whole hipster thing.

The solution is… exposure! As Joey Padilla pointed out, some of the calmest dogs you’ll ever see are the partners of the homeless. They are exposed to everything all the time. Lots of exposure reduces that innate fear of the unknown.

The “how to” takes time but it pays off. Take your puppy to a park, a mall or, if in Santa Fe, to the Plaza at least twice a week. Take them to places where they will be exposed to all sorts of stimuli. Here is the key: take along lots of treats.

When your puppy encounters something or someone that causes barking, whimpering or lunges, let the treats, in Joey’s words, “Rain from heaven.”

After a few trips your puppy will associate the guy with the beard and hat with treats and probably search them out in the crowds.

Testimonial: I began using this strategy with our Nellie and Tank. They’d always bark and lunge at a neighbor on our morning walks. After a few walks when treats “rained from heaven,” they now see him and turn to me ready for the celestial downpour. It’s pretty cool.

So apparently it’s never too late to train “late bloomers” as if they were puppies. Or as Tank would say, “treats rule!”

I was walking our Berners, Tank and Nellie, one morning. Over the hill came another couple with an older Lab. Our dogs immediately went crazy. The Lab just looked at them as if they had a screw loose.

The man yelled down (in a nice, yet subtly judgmental voice) “Did your dogs flunk puppy class?”

Sigh. When I was eleven, our German Shepherd named Shawnee and I got kicked out of puppu class. The truth of the matter is that every dog I’ve had since Shawnee has struggled or failed in puppy class.

Maybe, I thought, it’s me…

Time to do research! I talked to two of my favorite dog people, Joey Padilla of Santa Fe Tails and Jill Felice of Assistance Dogs of the West. They are studied and deeply experienced in the art of raising puppies to become great, bomb-proof dogs.

And I immediately discovered that the quest for this kind of dog starts long before you bring a puppy home.

“Bomb-proof” starts with breeding.

“Genetics are more important than training,” Jill told me. “Our dogs need to be ‘no-failure’ dogs because of the people we work with. They are folks with disabilities, veterans with PTSD and people with significant anxiety. It’s like dogs in the military. To have a dog willing to jump out of an airplane at 10,000 feet with his trainer requires a no-failure dog. We work with dogs who are bred for the right temperament: calm and confident. The dogs we work with have to come on to the planet with patience.”

Joey was even more blunt. “If we want bomb-proof dogs, it starts with breeders. They need to be licensed, and breeders need to stop breeding dogs for looks and start breeding for behavior.”

Although, according to the ASPCA, the majority of dogs are acquired through friends and family, approximately thirty percent of dogs come from breeders, and another 30 percent from shelters.
I’ll cover the amazing process of choosing a shelter dog in part three of this series. But here are some things to think about if you are planning on acquiring a life-time friend through a breeder.

1. Don’t acquire a life partner animal on an impulse. Never do that! Resist! A puppy bonds with you, and if you break that bond, it can be devastating for the dog…and for you.

​2. Understand that having a puppy means devoting time every day to training and nurturing it. Seriously, at least an hour a day of training and bonding, which doesn’t include you watching TV and leaving your puppy in a crate.

She just sat there judging me. She reminded me of a woman I had tried to talk to in Paris when I was twenty-five. The woman slowly looked me up and down, then rolled her eyes and turned away.

Never spoke.

But this wasn’t The Parisian Woman. This was a cat. Specifically, a year-old cat named Clover. Yet she had the same effect: I felt invisible and somehow diminished.

Then Clover stretched, silently hopped off the couch and walked by me without even looking back.

Just like in Paris.

So. How did a cat end up in our dog-centric house?  I blame my daughter, Brynne and her new husband, Luke.

Now, Luke is a great guy; we all loved him immediately. But there was a problem. Not a religious or political problem—worse! One night at a family dinner Brynne mentioned that Luke was a cat person and they were getting a kitten.

There was an uncomfortable silence after Brynne’s announcement. We were dog people. I could handle different political persuasions, or religions…but cats?

(The silence was like when the oldest son announces at a family dinner that he’s quitting college to become a dancer. Not that I remember that as if it were yesterday…)

I decided to break the silence by proposing that getting a cat was not a great idea. But then all the women in my family stared me down like the Eye of Sauron exerting his will over Middle-Earth. I was not to speak.

A month later they adopted a kitten from the shelter. Six months later as I had predicted, we were cat-sitting. Thus my first relationship with a feline began.

At first, Clover stayed in Brynne’s old room. I was admittedly curious. What do cats do? Mostly they lounge. I’d find Clover on the bed, in baskets or asleep on a stack of towels.

She wanted to have nothing to do with me or our dogs. By the way, our dogs started out curious, then they ignored her, and finally they became somewhat nervous. Clover would silently appear anywhere at any time, bat Tank on his nose, hiss and then disappear. I’m sure our dogs believed she practiced the dark arts of feline magic.

After a few days I noticed Clover peeking out around the bedroom door and sizing up the situation. It wasn’t that she was shy, it was more like disdain. If you’ve ever had teenage girls, you know the drill. “Fine, even though you are the most embarrassing parents on the planet, I will lower myself to eat dinner with you.”

At some point Clover realized that not only were dogs and people not a threat, but they were essentially lower life forms that she could rule. We entered the period of Cat Attack, where she pretended to be a velociraptor. I’d be sitting on the couch reading and “Bam!” there was a cat on my shoulder! We’d be asleep at 4:00 a.m. and then, “Yikes!” Clover would jump on my head and then be gone.

I was astonished at how quickly she could bite or scratch me and then vanish. It was like the old western movies. Someone would be shot, they’d look down and say, “Hah! Just nicked me.”  Then five minutes later they’re bleeding out.

Bleeding aside, I did warm up to Clover. One morning before work we actually played “bat the stuffed mouse,” “hide under the pillow,” and “attack the hand” for ten minutes. Then, in a totally manipulative way, she did the arch-the-back, purring, wanting-me-to-pet-her thing. She finished by curling up next to me and falling asleep. We were apparently bonding.

Take that, Parisian Woman!

I would never admit it to my family, but after day five, I could see having a cat in our house. (If you quote me, I will deny it.)

I thought about why. It occurred to me that although dogs are amazing, a cat inhabits a house. They move in and own it. Every room, every corner and every window sill is lived in. I’d look up and there would be Clover, peering down at me from a kitchen cabinet. Her presence was felt even when she was out of sight.

​After Clover left, our house felt a little emptier. But I had learned something: Maybe, just maybe, you need a cat to make a house a home. (But I never said that.)