Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

The Puppy

Our puppy, I promised myself, would sidestep all the nonsense about show dogs, breeders, and obedience training. We would make him a member of our family, and that environment, and not his genes, would decide his destiny. No way would we turn him into a ramrod like his old man. Like my last dog, 25 years earlier, I would raise him right – with lots of freedom and doggy surroundings.

We had no way of knowing, looking at his solemn little self, that he would mature into a creature every bit as dominant as his sire, all my hippie dogrearing practices to the contrary notwithstanding. We didn't know. We couldn’t know.

He was sacramentally still as I petted him, beautiful as only youth can be -- docile and unformed and almost sorrowfully calm. I looked into his eyes and saw the blankness that is typical of the breed. Poodle eyes have none of the golden fire of a husky or the emotional warmth of the Labrador. They are almost like sea lions' eyes, waxy black pools of god-knows-what.

We agreed to take the puppy home with us in another four weeks, wanting him to have plenty of time to play with his litter mates and be with his mother. By that time it was the week before Thanksgiving, and he rode home in the joined laps of Jonathan, 8 and Daniele, 12, still and uncomplaining. I looked at the kids’ faces as they petted the baby dog – they were never so beautiful to me.

As we arrived at our house, the rain was turning to snow – the first of winter. It would go on to be a record winter for snow in Minnesota -- sixty inches that would cover the state for five months, then melt into raging floods in the spring, sweeping away whole towns.

We led the little black dog to a sleety corner of our back yard to pee, and waited until he was done. It took ten minutes, and his black coat turned gray from the pelting ice.

I carried him the two flights to my attic office and sat with him and hummed a little tune and stroked his fur. We understood that the first hours in a new place can be traumatic. Baby dogs howl in distress to be in a strange place, away from mom and the sibs.

But this puppy was perfectly quiet. We played for a few minutes, me moving my hand toward his mouth and him snapping, a little feebly, at it. He was all in.

Looking back, what I did next was clearly a mistake. Daniele should have spent the first night with the dog, not me. But I set an oversized pillow on the ground and lay my head on it. The puppy sidled over to me and knelt beside me, putting his chin on my hands. And we napped like that for the better part of the early evening.

A Meaningful Name

The morning after your puppy's first night in your house is a classic "morning after." Now you get a chance to see more clearly what you have bought into, and what is in store for you.

Our puppy awoke that morning full of pee -- he had not messed the floor, or anything. Jubilant at this discovery, I picked him up and ran him downstairs and out the back door. The yard was completely iced in from the winter storm. The little dog found a spot, which was the spot we would have recommended. He stooped over, the winter wind whipping his soft hair across his face, and unburdened himself. Rachel and I immediately rewarded him with a few nuggets of the handmade kibble Brigitte supplied us with. He devoured it greedily, tail waggling in a clumsy, arrhythmic way.

We learned later that this foray into sleet and cold was the first time he had ever been outside, on his own four feet. This frozen moment was his introduction to The World.

Our whole family was touched by the little dog's spirit. Not once had he cried in the night, or complained in any way. We looked at one another jubilantly, as if we had made the best dog decision ever made.

The week that followed was 98% bliss, as we got to know our new toy. A puppy is almost literally a living toy. The word puppy comes from the French word papee, which means doll. And a doll is how we treat it. We handle it, hug it, stroke it, brush it, play with it. It is an extremely special thing, and it seems only natural to let all our emotions -- delight, sympathy, affection -- flow into it.

It is good that a puppy is cute, as it prevents most owners from killing it when it does the inevitable damage to house, property, and self. Puppies do harm primarily by biting, clawing, and excreting. It takes a couple of months to a couple of years to get these three behaviors under control. Most trainers stress positive reinforcement to get these behaviors in line -- praising, petting, and rewarding it with a treat each time he does the right thing. But most owners go negative at some point in the training process. Not to worry -- the puppy will continue to love you even if you spank it. But have a care -- everything you do to your dog comes back to you in some way, usually unexpected. Traumatized dogs recycle their bad feelings later. Which is why people are leery of adopting previously owned dogs.

There were difficulties with our new puppy. He would release a dozen drops of pee whenever one of us bent to be with him -- evidently out of happiness.

Urination was a management problem. Every evening I would set him down for his long evening sleep, and every morning I would awaken at about six, grab the dog, run down the stairs, and still in my pajamas, slip on a pair of galoshes and try to get the dog out before he released.

But it was a doomed enterprise because 1) he had to go really bad after a night in Daniele's room, and 2) he was genuinely happy to see me, so he started peeing  on me, in celebration of my interest in him.

He did not lift a leg to pee – a sign of male dominance -- until he was seven months old. For that entire period he crouched and released like a female, and hid the truth of his nature.

We kept the puppy on the second and third floors of our house because that was where we stayed. But it meant we had to carry him up and down the stairs, because puppies don't understand stairs. They can't get the rhythm, they are a little acrophobic, and they slip around a lot on polished wood. We worried about him getting anywhere near the stairs.

So we carried him up and down like a prince on a palanquin for six weeks, and then downstairs for another three weeks. One consequence of dog owning for me was a resumption of the backache that began when the kids were little. But by the end of this period he was able to do both by himself, and he would tear up and down the stairs, demonstrating his stair prowess.

The puppy was allowed, technically, to pee inside the house. We stationed flotillas of newspapers in the rooms he frequented most -- Daniele's bedroom and my third floor office. Brigitte had trained him to go on the paper, and he was pretty good about it, except that he considered himself to be on the paper if his front legs were on it -- he had only a scant idea what his hind legs did or where they were in particular. So he sometimes stood front legs on the paper while his back legs peed on whatever was next to the paper -- Hogarth prints, Dead Sea scrolls, my work, whatever was handy, irreplaceable, and absorbent.

A puppy's brain, I came to learn, is Platonic, like ours. It creates classes of things, and compares specific examples against those classic forms. An elm tree at the boulevard was obviously "a tree." As was the shrubbery around the front porch. So was the Christmas tree inside our living room. So was the philodendron inside our bedroom. All being trees, all were fit targets for his youthful fountain of pee.

Likewise, newspapers. Dogs 10,000 years ago never learned to be paper-trained. Perhaps the habit was formed over time, as dogs were cave-broken, then papyrus-trained. By the our time, newsprint had become the target of choice. But some ancient memory, combined with a dog's inherently weak color receptors, confused the forms of "newspaper" and "$900 Persian rug."

We learned other odd things about the creature in our midst. Whereas normal dogs eat kibble and chew on rawhide, this dog grazed on Kleenex and chewed on hats and gloves. We never did get the thing about Kleenex. No one in our family had ever swallowed a single ply of the stuff, but the dog put away whole boxes. It must have soothed some ancient craving, but for the life of me, I could not tell you what he used before there was tissue paper.

He was oral as hell. Not just his love for food, or his need to be tearing or gashing something every instant of the day. He longed to make contact with you, as intimacy or celebration of the relationship. But while it was the lamb that wanted to be friends, it was the crocodile that ran out to embrace you, white teeth flashing. We lived in constant fear of one of his love bites hooking our flesh and slicing us into curly fries.

At first we thought this was a puppy fixation, but as he got older, we figured out that this is a poodle trait. He impulsively “bites” everyone he meets and can get to on the hand, even strangers on the street, many of whom find him absolutely terrifying. This bite is not really a bite -- no skin is broken. But he squeezes your flesh for a moment, like a good firm handshake. You feel the ivory canines, you feel a slight crunch as his teeth sink in -- never enough to draw blood, but often enough to make you yip -- and you feel the warm slobber on your fingers.

He is saying hello in his dominant way: Hi. Gotcha.

Beau has destroyed a half dozen pairs of gloves this way. And he does it to everyone, including, when he was younger, complete strangers, who must feel as if their life is coming to an end. Obedience school did nothing to diminish this grisly handshaking ritual of his.

It would be so easy for Beauregard to guillotine my hand from my arm with those crocodile teeth, but he never has. God, it hurts sometimes, and I never feel very successful in communicating the pain these bites cause me. Beau just looks at me and grins. On the other hand (so to speak), he stops.

At the end of the first week, we held a family meeting and voted on a name. Some names were rejected because they didn’t make sense, or suggested the wrong nationality. Since he was a French poodle (never mind that poodle comes from the German word pudel, for splashing), we thought he should have a French name.

But it could not be a "foo-foo" name like Monsieur or Choufleur. And the name had to be easy to abbreviate. Thus we chose the name Beauregard for our little black dog. The name means "Looks good," and doggone it, he was a good-looking animal. It was the name of a distinguished Confederate general – no foo-foo there. And Beauregard shortens to a fine name for yelling from the front porch: Beau.

Puppy Love

But what I must warn you about here are the peculiar behaviors that show up in puppyhood. The little signs that, while cute today, signified something more problematic down the road.

I am thinking about the humping. From his very first day with us, little Beauregard would go into a semi-standing position, wrap his tiny front legs around one of our legs, and commence with a “sexual” thrusting that was hilarious to watch, but was a little unnerving. He especially liked doing it to Jonathan. With the boy kneeling on the floor, the dog would climb his back and start with the feeble thrusting. He was a skinny black creature of coat hangers and pipe cleaners, but humping away at Jonnie to beat the band. We howled and shooed Beau away. It's not easy explaining to an 8-year-old boy what the puppy wanted.

In fact, we had no idea what the puppy wanted. Surely a 12-week old puppy is not libidinous? I called Brigitte with this and the other concerns that were mounting. So to speak.  She was full of answers that, with one exception, were not answers:

Kleenex? "His father is a Kleenex eater. The entire lineage on the sire’s side ate Kleenex. I don't know why they do it, exactly. Try to keep it away from him."

Newspapers? "Use a lot at first, and gradually reduce their area. Praise him when he does it outside. Roll up the Oriental rugs."

Stairs? "You'll have to carry him up and down until he's four months old."

Biting? "Poodles do that. They bite you. Out of love." (I could discontinue the practice, she told me, by squeezing his lower jaw each time he bit me, to cause him pain. Trouble is, he was usually cavorting at about forty miles per four when it happens -- it's hard to grab a dog by the maw at that speed. And I was never anxious to cause him pain.)

Humping? She paused. "He's communicating something to you. He’s telling you that he’s glad you’re his. He's staking a claim to you."

We liked that answer. We liked that it meant Beau did not really want to have sex with our son. But we did not fully understand the answer, either. What Brigitte was communicating, was that this was a dog who would routinely classify things, all his life, as his and not-his. It was a sign of an ultra-powerful drive of territoriality and dominance.

Kindergarten

When a puppy is three months old, he is ready for puppy training, also known as puppy kindergarten. Most dog owners at this stage know their little dogs pretty well, and many of the shortcomings of their personalities have come into view.

Puppy training is the first time owners present their dogs to the world. Owners are not dogpeople at this point. They are an odd, insectlike, six-legged race, with the two species constantly jostling and tripping the other. The ambient condition of early owners is bewilderment, their intuitive mode is xenophobia. It goes beyond "My dog is better than your dog" to "Is that a dog?"

This hatred of others is both a badge of pride and a token of something darker, the fear that you have made a terrible mistake you are going to have to live with for the next fifteen years.

This is the danger stage in dog ownership, when many people conclude that the relationship is not working out. The puppy may still be pooping all over the house, destroying valuables with its teeth, and biting people. You have tried everything from positive reinforcement to the withdrawal of all affection, sometimes both in the same hour. Strangely, the dog seems to act more, and not less, confused.

Puppy training may be just what you need at this point. A trainer instructs you in the basics of housetraining, walking on a leash, and how to socialize with other dogs. I recommend that everyone go for one simple reason: to see that other people are suffering, that it’s not just you.

Young Beauregard enjoyed kindergarten, and by and large he behaved -- he never defecated on the carpet or piddled on the instructor. But I noticed he was different from the other dogs. Whereas they acted like babies, hewing to their masters' ankles, he pulled the leash to the extreme, trying to get at the other puppies.

He was a dog without social fear, I thought proudly. No shrinking violet in our house!