Wednesday night I was reading one of the four puppy raising books I took out of the library and I nearly had a panic attack because basically the author of the book said if your puppy hasn’t met at least 100 people by the time they are 3 months old they will always be fearful of people. Given how timid Wookie is around strangers it totally stressed me out, especially since she just surpassed the three month on December 21st and besides the kids and my friend C, who came over a few weeks ago, she’s only met two other people and that was on Tuesday. And she was scared of them too! I literally had to take a Xanax to calm down enough to go to sleep. I don’t want our dog to end up being neuortic or maladjusted. I picture us taking her to the park for walks and to play but right now she’s too scared of everything and everyone for that to be enjoyable for her. If we have her outside and there’s any noise she stops and panics. And if someone walks by? She tries to bolt for the door to go back inside and ends up choking herself on her leash. Ugh! I felt a little better after pulling up the book info on Goodreads, however, since a lot of the reviews cited that part of the book being total crap and a scare tactic. Well, it certainly worked because it scared me. I don’t want to be one of those people who has a shitty dog because I didn’t raise her properly! I posted about it on Facebook and one of my friends messeged me to assure me I was worrying too much.
For the sake of posterity, I’m going to list here the things she does that we don’t like, as well as the things she is good about.
Bad:
She is an ankle biter, although she’s getting better with that.
She constantly pulls on the leash especially when we come inside the house. She practically chokes herself even though the routine is the same. You’d think she’d learn by now to wait for me to remove her leash before trying to run into the house.
She pees in excitement when she sees us. This seems to actually be getting worse because before it was only when we came home from being gone but now we could go upstairs and come back down five minutes later and she pees. We have started completely ignoring her until she stops jumping and whining so that she won’t get overly excited eventually as there’s nothing in it for her (i.e. no attention).
She chews/bites our hands. Now that her teeth are coming in it actually hurts. She also bites at my clothing and is going to ruin stuff. We try to distract her by putting puppy chew toys in her mouth.
She puts EVERYTHING she finds outside in her mouth. Leaves, sticks, snow, you name it. Then when we come inside we have to inspect her mouth and remove the debris.
She doesn’t consistently use her pee pad in her pen. She seems to use it overnight but during the day I find pee puddles on the tile and the pee travels in the grout and gets all over. And she walks in it so then she smells. I’ve given her paws a cleaning but it’s getting tough because now she wants to attack the towel and bite it really hard which makes it tough to dry her off. The first few times I gave her a bath, a full one no less, she was calmer. Now she fidgits which makes it harder.
Forget trying to clip her nails or clean the buildup in the corner of her eyes – she wants to bite the clippers and the comb. I was using cotton balls before but she tried eating those too. The vet showed me how “easy” it is to use the comb but the jokes on me – it was easy for the vet because Wookie is so scared of her she just calmly sits there. With me she fights back so I can’t even get the comb near her to pull out the eye boogers. So frustrating! Now I get why people pay a groomer. We probably will also as it’s not worth struggling with her.
When we’re playing with her often she will get overstimulated and start jumping all over us and biting us. I put her in a time out in her pen but on Wednesday she was doing it so often she spent more time in there than out with me and it was very frustrating.
Ok, so that’s a lot of complaints. Here’s the good stuff:
She knows her name.
She knows the sit command.
She kind of knows the stay command (although we’ve been saying wait).
She is quiet all night long and doesn’t whine.
She is quiet when we leave the house and she’s left alone (and we know this because we have a camera that has sound to check on her).
She doesn’t get destructive when she’s left alone unless you count her pulling her fleece out of her crate. She mostly just naps.
When she gets yappy if you ignore her she will eventually stop and go take a nap.
She hasn’t peed on the carpet in two weeks (unless you count Wednesday night but she mostly went on the tile but it was by where the carpet starts so some got on it).
She almost always uses her pee pad when she has to poop.
When she’s out playing sometimes she will indicate to us she has to pee by running over to the door (if she isn’t blocked from that area) or repeatedly boucing off the makeshift walls we made out of cardboard to keep her contained to just the living room so we can keep an eye on her.
Wednesday night I posted on Facebook an open invite for people to come meet her and said if they had a dog to bring all the better. One person, a girl I’ve known for over twenty years but have never met in person (we chatted on a BBS), took me up on the offer and brought her two dogs (both poodle mixes) over on Friday. Her one dog pooped on the carpet shortly after they arrived but other than that they were very chill which I think helped Wookie relax. The plan is to bring her to my friend’s house next time to see if she’ll remember the dogs and relax enough to actually play with them. Even though they were over for four hours she never got to that point.
Interestingly enough, she seemed to take to Brother J immediately when he spent some time with us this weekend. I’ll write more about that in a future entry.