Coherent Dog Raising

Once upon a time my ex-husband and I adopted a poodle. Surrey was small, and red and adorable. I had only had cats, and he hadn’t had a dog in 20 years. But Surrey was easy to love and we loved her completely, and she grew into a smart and friendly dog.

About 15 years later, after she passed, we adopted two havanese brothers,
Maxxy and Dash…one for each of our sons. One was a playful introvert and one a hypervigilant extrovert. We loved them entirely and they were great members of our young family.

 Fast forward 15 years — after the harrowing loss of them both — I have recently adopted a golden doodle named Indigo. He is now 5 months old, teething and house breaking just like the others before him, but the world he inhabits is entirely different.

When he was fully vaxxed and able to take to the streets, we could barely walk three steps without bumping into another dog. When dog owners meet, they typically ask the gender and the age
of each other's pets. After a week of walks I commented to one of the more communicative moms, that every dog we meet seems to be 5 years old! She replied, “Of course, they’re all COVID dogs!!”

I was gobsmacked. During the lockdown I’d read that people were adopting dogs like mad, to try and cope with the loneliness and isolation — that the shelters were almost empty — but until that moment I hadn’t really clocked the result.
And in that moment of epiphany, everything suddenly made sense: the entire dog care industrial
complex that had been built to accommodate these stressed out, pandemic-addled, first-time dog owners and their equally stressed out pets:

-PETCO had been reinvented as a Bloomingdale’s for dogs.
-Dog food was now gourmet and cost more than human food..and many dogs won’t eat it.
-Trainers had two month long waiting lists, and could command $400 an hour with no particular license.
-Dog walkers with one month of experience were asking $40 for a half hour walk.
-Boarding schools and classes were offered for every age and size of dog. They boasted dogs that would ring a bell to be taken out, and could walk through Times Square off leash. (I can barely do that myself!)
-Day care and grooming could cost as much as you’d spend on a child.

And if you declined to participate in this canine militia, you were not only raising a monster you were an anarchist yourself.

In 30 years of dog raising, I had never used a trainer, nor hired walks. The only tricks my dogs knew were how to get you to smile. I raised them like I raised my sons: healthfully, in safety and with love. I learned them, and followed their leads as best I could. I attuned to them and they attuned to me. They occasionally were naughty or annoying, but mostly they were fine. More than fine, in fact.

As I walk Indigo, I seem to be fly paper to unsolicited advice and reprimands, (and keep in mind that my pup is only five months old, has lived with me for only three short months):
-“He shouldn’t be barking with excitement when he sees another dog.”
-“He shoudn’t rise to meet a hand that darts out to pet him.”
-“He should walk in a perfectly straight line at my side.”
-“He should never pull me to go faster…not even when he sees a bird or another running dog.”

And how will all of this perfect behavior be instilled?  By behavior modification, of course! By paying someone half my income to get this puppy to stop being a puppy, rather than simply keeping him safe and waiting for him to mature.

But. alas, I am not a fan of behavior modification. I am a fan of coherent understanding, and compassionate learning. My puppy barks at other dogs to say ‘hello’, ‘wait up, I want to meet you and say hi!’ It is friendliness, not aggression. And over time he will learn that this noise is off-putting and has the reverse of the desired effect. He will also learn that when he darts out, I pull back on the leash to keep him safe, and it hurts. He will learn these things just as he learned to relieve himself outside rather than on pads near his crate where he has to smell the result. Just as he has learned that I appear every morning to open his crate, where he sleeps safely every night, to feed him and play with him and walk him, without his whimpers to remind me. And in a few weeks he will lose the last of his baby teeth and his gums will stop hurting and he won’t need to chew on me or anything in my home.

And he will continue to teach me: that he is happiest when I say, “good boy”, even without a treat. That he is sorry when he nibbles on me too hard, and tries to lick away the pain. That he is a curious child who needs his curiosity respected and his mistakes redirected and forgiven, or he feels sad. That he is an individual with his own preferences and sensitivities, and is not the same as the 200 other puppies who took a class and learned to robotically do as it was told. He is my teacher, as I am his. And if I really pay attention, he will turn out just as well as his predecessors: Surrey, Maxxy and Dash.