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.
CHAPTER 9
CIVILIZING FLINT
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 out 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.
Since Joan and I both worked fairly long hours away from home, we kept Flint confined by a baby gate in the kitchen during the day, although eventu
ally, when he was housebroken, he would have the run of the house. I spread some newspapers near the door to the backyard. These were initially marked with a bit of Flint’s urine, to attract him to that spot if he had to go during the day. After a couple of weeks I would generally come home to dry newspapers. I believe that he learned to keep from messing inside because it was never rewarded. On the other hand, he knew that when I arrived home, I would immediately rush him out to do his business and he would get a treat for doing it outside.
There were a couple of “accidents.” One weekend, both Joannie and I were at home but attending to household chores. Suddenly, I heard Joan’s voice raised in anger. I rushed to see what was wrong and found her bent over Flint. She had pushed his face down to the floor an inch or so from the edge of a suspicious puddle and was yelling “Bad dog!” at him.
“Joannie, just let him go. I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“He’s got to learn not to go in the house. He is so arrogant. He looked right at me and peed on the floor,” she replied angrily.
“Punishing him isn’t going to work. He’ll just learn that he can’t go in front of people, so he’ll find hidden places to mess. It might create other problems, like making him reluctant to go when he is being walked, because he feels he might get punished for being seen when he’s peeing.”
“Look,” she said, “this is the way people have house-trained dogs for centuries. If the dog makes a mess, you show it to him or push his nose in it, and punish him. That way he learns not to do it in the future.”
“Do you remember Anne—she works in the library on campus?” I asked. “She and her husband Angus have a Labrador retriever named Trixie. Anyway, I ran into her a while ago and she told me that she was having trouble with her dog. It started out as a simple housebreaking situation. If the pup peed on the floor, Angus would grab Trixie, shove her nose in the urine, yell at her, give her a swat on her rump, and then throw her out of the open kitchen window into their yard [which is where they want her to go when she needs to eliminate]. Angus is a big man and the whole procedure was probably pretty traumatic for the dog. So instead of stopping her from urinating, this procedure actually produced a different kind of urination. When Angus would first come into the house after being away for a while, Trixie would look at him, cringe down, and pee. Animal behaviorists call this submissive urination, and dogs sometimes do this when they are frightened by somebody or some situation. Angus insisted that he would solve her behavior problem the traditional way and continued his routine of yelling, slapping, shoving her nose in it, and then tossing her out the kitchen window.
“According to Anne, it really didn’t work at all and now they have a new problem. Whenever Angus enters the house now, Trixie runs over to him, pees on the floor, and then jumps out the kitchen window.”
Joannie looked at me as though I had been speaking a foreign language and replied, “I never even thought about throwing him out of the window!”
A couple of months after Flint had come home with us, he was on the window seat barking as quickly and as loudly as his puppy lungs would allow. The house must have been under attack from a breath of wind or some similar threat, and I was admiring this early display of watchdog instincts with some amusement.
Joan stopped her reading, looked up at the pup and then back to me, and asked, “Isn’t it about time that you trained your dog how to live in harmony with a civilized society?”
“I’m working on it,” I replied.
“Really?”
“Sure. He’s already housebroken well enough to give him the run of the house, and I’ve already taught him some advanced first-grade material to take advantage of the early arithmetic ability that he’s shown. Watch.”
I called Flint’s name, and courtesy of his umbilical training, he immediately stopped barking and turned to look at me. I called him over and had him sit in front of me.
“Now watch this, Joannie. Flint, how much is two plus two minus four?”
The little gray dog sat looking at me not making a sound or a movement.
“That’s absolutely right! Nothing. What a clever and well-trained dog.”
I glanced in Joan’s direction and saw that she had pursed her mouth in a pained little smile and was shaking her head. “I’m living in a situation comedy program,” she sighed.
But she was right that it really was time to begin to train Flint for his life in a world of humans.
For someone who lives in North America it is often a revelation to see how well dogs behave in Europe, where they appear to be much better trained and under control. The truth of the matter is that the average European spends less time training his dog than does the average North American. The dogs in Europe are not better trained, but they are better socialized and thus have become much more civilized.
Consider the life of an average North American pet dog. His family awakens in the morning and, after a few moments of greeting, they either put him out in the backyard or give him a 15- or 20-minute walk. Then back into the house while family members disperse to work, school, or to do chores. In the evening there might be a few minutes of play with the dog and another walk. Then, a few hours later, it is off to bed. The only time the dog may get any extended experience with the outside world and new people might be on weekends when the dog is taken to the park or on an outing with the family. Even then, his experience might include many hours of staying in the car while the family goes to a restaurant, shopping, or to some public event simply because many public venues ban dogs from their premises. This means that the dog has limited experience with new people and with how to conduct himself in new places.
Europe places fewer restrictions on dogs. In many countries, a dog can accompany his family when they go downtown, on public transit, into cafés and shops, and to many different events and activities. Thus, from early puppyhood, the dog is constantly encountering new people and new places, so these events become more routine and less exciting or stressful. European dogs appear to be better trained simply because they are more self-controlled and more responsive to their masters under a broad variety of conditions.
If you look at the notebook of any dog behavioral consultant, you will see two large categories of difficulties that people have with their dogs. The first set has to do with fear-based problems. We can list these as something like “Lassie is_________” where the blank is filled in with “shy,” “timid,” “skittish,” “easily frightened,” “afraid of men with hats (or beards or glasses),” “frightened by the sound of trucks (or vacuums, thunder, or crowds),” “uneasy around children (or large dogs or flickering lights),” and so forth.
The second group of problems has to do with aggression and runs something like “Rover is_________,” “dominant,” “pushy,” “snappish,” “suspicious of men in raincoats (or dark-skinned men or men smoking),” “aggressive toward children (or puppies or any other dogs),” “hard on the fingers when he takes treats,” “barks violently at everyone who enters the house (or is seen across the street),” “doesn’t tolerate being touched (or approached or even looked at),” “tends to frighten people with his jumping (or snarling or staring) behaviors.” While at first glance this looks like a mass of many different behavior problems, each of which must have a separate reason or cause, all of these difficulties can stem from a set of experiences that the dog had, or didn’t have, well before he was 6 months of age. Most of these problems can be avoided with a little bit of work when you first get a puppy, namely, with “socialization.”
Socialization is the process by which a dog (or a person) learns what his “society” expects of him and learns the rules and behaviors that will allow him to become a functioning member of that society. For wild animals this is straightforward: a wolf pup only has to learn that he is a wolf and then to learn how to act around other wolves in a wolf society. Because dogs are domesticated, however, and live their lives with humans, their socialization is more complicated. A dog must socialize to do
gs in order to learn that he is a dog and how to function in a canine society, but he must also learn how to act and behave in the society of people. Dogs must welcome both dogs and humans (and sometimes cats) as acceptable members of their family or pack.
The importance of socialization for dogs was first demonstrated by John Paul Scott and some of his associates, including John L. Fuller. Their research was done at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and continued for 13 years. It resulted in a book entitled Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, which was written for a scientific audience and unfortunately is not an easy read for most dog owners.
Scott learned that there is a very early window of time during which it is vital for the puppy to have adequate contact with people and dogs. If there are not enough of these social interactions, fear and aggression problems may develop that can be very difficult to correct later on. Similarly, part of the process of learning to adapt to the world involves exposure to different places, objects, and events.
Scott was the most significant twentieth-century researcher on dog behavior and deserves to be as well known to the public as Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner. His many discoveries include the difference between competitive aggression (over an item of value) and social dominance–based aggression in dogs (competing for a higher rank in the pack). He provided the first descriptions of a number of common canine behavioral problems, including separation anxiety. He even coined the term sociobiology to describe the field that he was opening up—namely the study of the social behavior of animals and humans and how this is related to genetics, early experience, and the survival of species.
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