by Michael Finley Copyright (c) 1998 by Michael Finley
IT MUST BE PUPPY LOVE
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 (he would not be able negotiate to stairs for at least another month), 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. To lie on your back and be assaulted by a litter of puppies, simultaneously climbing, clawing, wagging, and licking, is an experience unlike any other.
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 the dog. 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 again, 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. But by the 21st century, newsprint was 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." And we're not talking pee here.
We learned other odd things about the dog. 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 rolls of it and 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, and you feel the warm slobber on your fingers. He is saying hello in his dominant way.
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.
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. We howled and shooed Beau away. It is 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 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."
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 the dog 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 a very powerful drive of territoriality and dominance.
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 -- "my dog is better than your 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.
That is how, within a few days of getting him, I became his primary caretaker. It was as well, because ever since we slept on the dog pillow together, Beau was imprinted with the idea of me as his "alpha" or superior. Which left the two of us to learn the art of living and working together in my home office.
My first inclination was to put the dog in a small kennel and leave him in Daniele's room. Brigitte told me that a dog in a house needs a home, and there is no better home for a dog than an indoor kennel. A kennel, also called a crate, is a breathable indoor container, sometimes made of a molded plastic clamshell, sometimes all-steel, like a giant birdcage. The dog is supposed to spend much of his daily time in it.
"You have to crate them," she said. "Otherwise they are always into everything."
"But Brigitte," I said. "won't the puppy, seeing you're up and about, want to be up and about with you?" To me, the crate was the canine equivalent of jail -- and confinement could never be fun.
Brigitte looked me in the eye. "Not if they like it in there," she said.
"Why do they like it?"
"Because good things happen there." She went to a freezer and pulled out something frozen, a beef knuckle-bone, wrapped in paper. "Put this in his crate. Tell him it is his new friend. He will love it in there."
I did this. I put Beau in the crate with the bone, and told him it was his new friend. He looked around at the six close walls, looked up at me, and began to whine. I opened the door, and Beau dragged his new friend out of the crate, dropped it on the braid rug and went to town. We tried the crate a few more times, but he gave no sign of reconciling himself to its narrow confines.
I tried the crate perhaps ten times. He seemed happiest in it when I was in it with him. He wanted to be with me, whether it was in the crate or out. Since it was very crowded with both of us inside, I decided to let us both out.
Out of the crate, Beau became a free agent in our house, roaming where he wished well before he "earned the privilege," as trainers call it. Fortunately for us and for the house, he did not roam far. His only desire from his twelfth week in life was to follow me from room to room. Never demanding much except the grace of my company, whether I was cooking in the kitchen, taking an urgent phone call, or sitting on the toilet.
It was an odd combination: a dog determined to dominate every other thing in his life except me, to whom he was a most abject slave.
It was also one of those chicken/egg controversies that I am unable, years into this experiment, to resolve: Does the dog appear to require freedom because I require freedom for it? Or do I want freedom on the dog's behalf because I feel kenneled when he's in there?
I have seen him sit quietly on his haunches for the longest period, intently eyeing the indicator. What is he looking for? With dogs, you never know.
This is the mystery I like about dogs, and that science can never resolve. On a good day he can spend hours gazing at the blinking green light, and I can spend hours gazing at him gazing. Each of us trying to fathom the object of one another's interests, with no hope of success.
Having a home office dog is good business, however. They provide security. Since acquiring our puppy no criminal has broken into our home. Few have even come to the door. Beau stands at the third floor window parapet, scanning the neighborhood for malefactors. He is especially suspicious of school crossing guards and people using walkers. Which is pretty smart of him, as those are perfect disguises for today's savvy breed of malefactors.
When you first get a dog, they are often quite small, but over time they expand into full-sized animals. When they are little, like beau, is when they are most feral. The focal point of their daily existence is their teeth. If they are conscious, they must be chewing, and it is the challenge of the home office dog owner to supply alternatives to their natural chewing preferences, which are power cables, floppy diskettes, curly keyboard cables, wingtips and first editions.
My office used to contain a computer, a desk, and a few bookshelves. During his puppyhood it came to contain those items, plus about $1,000 worth of squeaky chew toys, including a baseball bat, and a football, and a furry lamb chop. But Beau still prefers my stuff. I have had to wrap my bookshelves in two-ply plastic sheeting four feet high, to protect my books and papers. On sunny days I wear sunglasses to fend off the glare against the plastic.
Beau's curiosity overcame even the plastic sheeting. He learned to "cruise" the bookshelves, poking his nose above the four-foot line. As he grew, he learned to pull books from the shelf. One day he pulled an entire bookcase over onto himself. I swiveled in my chair to see him covered in self-help books, and mouthing a title by Napoleon Hill.
People ask if it is hard to work with a home office puppy. It is not hard if you concentrate your work in short bursts, in between worrisome noises behind you, and what is even worse, worrisome silence. Several times each day I look over one shoulder, expecting to see the faithful home office puppy, regarding me contentedly from his mat, but find him instead in the kitchen, two floors down, with his face embedded in a wet coffee filter.
Communicating is another challenge. Many dogs begin to bark when the phone rings and continue until you hang up. Many times I have caught myself saying, "Shut up -- oh, not you, Mr. Vice President."
My puppy is growing every day. Half the day he spends under my desk, sleeping with his chin on my toes. The other half of the time he is cruising, looking for something to mouth - a shoe, a yogurt container, a lightbulb, a pop can. If you can think while a puppy beside gnaws on an aluminum can, then you are a man, my son.
One day my puppy tried to curl under my desk and bumped his head. The space had shrunk, or he had grown.
Dust is an issue with dogs and home offices. Across the room, computers also generate static electricity, which draws environmental dust toward the machine. Despite the screws and fitted panels, computers cannot be sealed off entirely -- they'd overheat and explode.
Dogs, by contrast are dust generators. If you needed a really good metaphor for what a dog is, as stuff, you might consider an inside-out, full vacuum-cleaner bag. Backlight a dog sometime and you will see the dust rising from its body like a spray of subatomic particles.
With a stop-action motion picture camera and the right kind of backlighting, you could document that a dog and a computer in a room together create a continuous magnetic arc of airborne dust, from sleeping heap to humming box.
One day you will open up the computer, and you will find inside it -- another dog. Take it out, place it next to the one still snoozing in the sunbeam, and start all over again.
A free gift awaits visitors to Michael Finley's web site at http://mfinley.com. Mike is co-author of this spring's eagerly waited book Transcompetition.
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