Some days it just doesn’t go according to plan.
It’s not yet 7am and Georgia is barking shrilly to get out of her Puppy Palace (indoors puppy pen). She has decided that she is only happy in there is for meals. Pretty much at all other times she now wants to be with the big dogs and the humans. We are transitioning to this in gradual stages, but to be honest, I am allergic to barking inside the house, it makes me feel very stressed and I just want to keep the peace. (I can hear my friends laugh at this because my Sheltie Macy has a VERY loud bark!). I let her out to wander around the living area.
It’s cold and I’m struggling to light the fire. It’s 1deg C outside and I dash back to the bedroom to put on some warm clothes. This is when I start to hear commotion, and I realise Georgia is chasing Macy (she’s 8yrs old with waning puppy tolerance) around the lounge room. Tansy (G’s Mum) is trying to intervene…I can hear the kerfuffle grow and when I return, I can see that Georgia thinks this is a great game!
Half-dressed I try to intervene and, farcically, I find myself at the tail-end of a chasey-conga line. Eventually I manage to intercept Georgia, and, with a couple of cardboard box “toys”, I lure her to the deck where she is happy to play. The cardboard boxes buy me enough time to dash back to the bedroom to get properly dressed and light the fire. But I feel defeated, frustrated and angry with myself for making such a mess of puppy management this morning. I’m supposed to know what I’m doing but Georgia is learning behaviour I don’t want her to learn – playing inside, chasey games, high excitement in the house.
When the barking in the Puppy Palace started, I knew Georgia had eaten, she’d been outside to toilet and had a lengthy outdoors play (all before 7am!). Her needs had been met.
I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the barking in her pen was just frustration at being confined and that she would settle in the living room. Her barking was making me wince and feel stressed.
Mistake #1: Sometimes barking is an “I want” communication rather than “I need” (toilet, food, warmth). And this morning her barking in the pen was “I want” … to play in the house!
Mistake #2: At this point in her development, I should not leave Georgia unsupervised with Macy. It is too much to expect her to make the kind of decision I want her to make right now.
There are many layers of learning for a puppy to have the self-control and skills for peaceful freedom in the house, especially when it is a multi-dog household. A small breed pup raised with a breeder that used toys & enrichment to build the value of the Puppy Palace will likely be happy in there for longer than say, a working breed puppy that was housed outside in a large dog run from 4 weeks of age. At some point most pups will become bored with the confinement area and want more freedom. Whether that happens at 9weeks, 12 weeks or whenever depends on the breed and the puppy’s learning up to now. But it will happen. Understanding the pup’s learning and environmental experience during their first 8 weeks of life with the breeder will help new owners understand where their pup is at.
I’m in the process of letting Georgia have more supervised access to the living room with Macy. The key word in that sentence is “supervised”.
As new Puppy Guardians it is our job to learn how our puppy communicates and to decipher whether the fracas is an “I need” communication or an “I want” communication.
This morning, I didn’t pause to assess if her barking was an “I want”, I just took a shortcut to stop the barking by letting her out of the pen. This came with the expectation that she would make a choice of a much older dog, i.e. calmness while I put on some warm clothes and lit the fire. Georgia did what makes sense to her – playtime! She wasn’t being “naughty” or wilful, she was being a normal 12-week-old puppy that wants to play.
I should have taken time to provide her enrichment items in the Puppy Palace to occupy her while I was out of the room. In trusting her with freedom inside at too young an age I created a stressful situation for all, Georgia, Tansy, Macy and myself. But let’s be clear, the mistake was definitely mine.
Puppy development is rapid and constantly changing. What works for managing a pup one week, will likely need to be updated the next week. As puppy owners, we need to be constantly evaluating our pup’s development so we can change gears and take care of all the members of the household.
Every experience your pup encounters provides them another layer of learning. The learning process goes on 24/7, whether they are learning something you want them to learn, or, like my experience this morning, something you don’t want them to learn. With a little bit of forethought we can provide the environment to help them learn the skills we want them to learn.
Love
Jenny & Georgia