Puppy containment -- Part 2

Back when we had our second CCI puppy, I remember desperately asking a highly experienced puppy raiser what she did to survive the trying early months.  As I recall, she replied that she couldn't live without an "x-pen." I ran out and bought one. 

"X" stands for "exercise." Ours has 8 folding panels, each two and a half feet tall and made of metal wire. We can clip the ends together to form an octagonal pen or arrange them to form other shapes (a 2x6-foot pen, a 4x4-foot square, etc.) 

Over the years, we've set our x-pen up on the patio and put various pups in it, mostly on sunny days, mostly for just a short time (until the puppy gets bored and cries to escape.) But with Dionne's arrival, I had a new idea. From the garage, I got a piece of heavy-duty plastic tarp.  I lay that on the carpet in my office, set the x-pen on top of it, and added a couple of toys. 

The first attempt

After just a few days of puppy attacks.

It seemed a brilliant solution. Dionne could occupy a big space right next to me, where she could snooze or play with her toys. She could see I was at her side, but she couldn't just roam around, to randomly pee on the carpet or chew my electric wires or rip up my artificial ficus or discover one of the many other possibilities for getting into trouble. 

What I didn't envision was that she would eat the plastic tarp. By yesterday she had chewed some great gaping holes in it, as well as making many small punctures. When she peed in the x-pan, the urine leaked through the punctures -- onto my rug.

So now Steve has had another idea that we hope will actually work. This afternoon, he went to Home Depot and bought two remaindered pieces of vinyl flooring.  They're pretty ugly. But we don't care.  We've set one up on the carpet next to the kitchen. The other is in my office, under the x-pan. 

Will Dionne be able to chew up linoleum?

Stay tuned.

Will this work?

Third time's the charm

In my last post, I mentioned that Steve and I only relax when Dionne has pooped within the last 5 minutes. This morning, I learned that's a mistake.

She has continued to be angelic about sleeping through the night, but this morning she began to moan and yip a little before 6, so Steve took her outside. Upon his return he reported that she had pooped with great urgency, spending no time at all stalling and sniffing. "She appears to have heard that there are poop-production quotas," he said. "And she's behind."  He put her in the kennel in his office and returned to bed. Around 6:30, I got up to feed both dogs their breakfasts.  Dionne acted ecstatic as I filled the bowls, and she dove into hers when I set it down in the kennel. But less than a minute later, with the puppy chow only half consumed, she was whining and barking. Puzzled, but thinking of the lessons of just yesterday, I took her to the lower yard where she immediately deposited a second large pile.

With that prelude, I felt cheerful as I set off on what I thought would be an hour-long walk up Mt. Soledad and over to my neighborhood coffee shop. With Tucker on his leash and Dionne in her stroller, we started down the block. I felt a little disappointed to see Dionne once again standing up and looking over the front of the stroller, looking for all the world as if she were thinking of jumping out. As we started up the hill, her agitation increased, and she began yowling like she did the first time I took her out in the stroller last week. I told her to be quiet and calm down. But I didn't understand what she was signaling until she backed up against the side of the carriage (as if trying lift her little rear end up high enough so that she could keep the stroller interior clean) and pooped for a third time. Those of us who become caught up in the bizarre subculture of obsessive puppy-defecation monitoring develop keen eyes for assessing the firmness of the production, and I can assure the world: this was NOT diarrhea.

What followed put me in a foul mood.  She'd gotten it on the sides and fleece of the carriage, and I got it on my bare hand. I returned home; abandoned my workout.

"Now," Steve noted, "she probably won't poop again for another day." Yeah. Right. 

The picture of relaxation (after all the excitement of the morning.)

Puppy containment

The CCI manual makes it sound so easy. It offers this sample schedule for a 2-4-month old puppy: 

6:30 a.m. -- Toilet pup, feed and offer a drink, play with pup, and toilet before returning to crate. 
Midmorning -- Toilet puppy, keep pup out of crate for play and/or training, toilet puppy before crating. 
Noon -- Feed puppy second meal and offer water, toilet puppy, play time, toilet before crating. 
Mid-afternoon-- Offer pup water, toilet them, quick walk or play time, return them to crate. 
5:00 p.m. -- Feed puppy third meal and offer water, toilet puppy, allow puppy to play in kitchen while preparing dinner, toilet puppy before crating. 
7:00 p.m.-- Toilet pup, play/training time, practice cradling while watching tv, return to crate. Cut off water access at this time. 
Bedtime -- Toilet pup, play time before bed, pup sleeps in crate for the night. 

Why can't we do that? 

We have various puppy-containment structures: three dog crates and an exercise pen. Dionne spends part of the day in one or more of them, sleeping or playing. Often contented. 

But unless one of us has just witnessed her peeing and pooping -- and I mean like within the last 5 minutes -- we react with alarm to any whining or barking or crying within a confinement vessel because it may mean that she needs to go out to poop or pee, distress that we ignore at our peril.  So we scoop her up and carry her back to the farthest area of the yard and and watch her like a hawk until she poops and pees.  Or we get tired of watching her screw around and give up. 

I've had a fair amount of time during the last week to reflect on the difference in appearance of a puppy who needs to poop or pee from a puppy who's just screwing around. Puppy fun often consists of sniffing the ground intensely, moving from one spot after another, sometimes at rocket speed, but often stopping to rip up clumps of grass, chew on randomly encountered stones or pieces of bark, gnaw on plants, dig, squeeze under or behind the creepiest, most spider-infested objects in the yard, plow through piles of leaves, flop down on the ground. But puppies who need to poop do almost exactly the same things! The only way you can tell the difference is if they actually poop. 


During the course of writing these last few paragraphs, I had Dionne in the exercise pen in my office. Twice, after she whined, I put down my iPad, took her down the stairs and all the way out back. Each time she peed. But then she only screwed around. I returned her to the pen, started writing again, and she barked at me and whined loudly. Then she began to race around in circles within the pen.  I knew what was happening. I jumped up and grabbed her as she squeezed out two little balls of poop, but I terrified her by snatching her up, running down the stairs, depositing her on the patio, and yelling, "HURRY!"  

She deposited the rest of the very substantial load and is now sleeping like a little angel.

Because Steve and I have raised four previous CCI puppies, I know -- intellectually -- that in just two months, she'll be so well adjusted to our routines that I will once again begin to forget what these earliest days are like.  That's why I'm recording it. 

Excellent progress!

This is one lovable puppy. We went to bed around 10 last night, Dionne didn't make a sound until 6:15 this morning. I scooped her up and hurried downstairs, thinking she must be ready to burst. But she was so overjoyed to be alive and outdoors and within sight of Tucker, that she raced around, attacking him for several minutes, before she could turn her attention to the mundane business of elimination. 

All this while she's still so small she easily fits under the couch (a trick we've never seen before.) That won't be possible for long. 

Rock Starlet

There may be exceptions, but most people who raise puppies for CCI find the first two months to be tough. Beyond the normal challenges (housebreaking, stopping the pup from chewing, digging, garbage-eating, etc.), it takes a while for puppies to learn to walk well enough on a leash to go for serious outings. Furthermore, CCI tells puppy-raisers not to overstimulate their charges or expose them to potential disease. (Full immunity from their vaccinations doesn't come until they're 4-5 months old.)

It's confining. But with Darby (Dionne's predecessor), I discovered a lifesaver. Another puppy-raiser (Pattie Urie) loaned us her puppy stroller.  Using it meant that I could keep up my normal exercise walks. It even enabled Darby and me to participate in a puppy drill-team event in Balboa Park. When Darby got old enough, we returned the stroller to Pattie but I started looking for a second-hand one on Craig's list. We got lucky, and now with Dionne, we're breaking it in.

I zipped her into it for an hour-long walk on Friday and she howled, barked, and moaned almost the whole time. But on a shorter outing yesterday, she was calmer. This morning, Steve and Tucker came along, and we didn't even close up the front. It had occurred to me that any puppy who was afraid to walk down a few stairs wasn't likely to leap out of her stroller. Wrong! She did leap out -- probably because she didn't know what would happen.  She wasn't hurt, but she didn't try it again. Our hope is that she'll very quickly get used to riding in plein-air. That's more fun for her -- and for us.

Exposing her to the world, like this...

... gets you a lot of attention.  People literally stop you in the street. Everyone smiles, and many coo and ask to hold her or pet her. I've had at least two grown men pull out their phones to photograph her. Neighbors have stopped their cars in the street to exclaim over her cuteness. This morning, one woman told us we were saints for raising service dogs.

That's just silly. We truly want Dionne to graduate and change someone's life for the better. We'll do our best to try to achieve that goal. But the truth is that we're also in it for the fun. Steve and I don't normally crave attention when we're out in public. But it's fun to feel, however briefly, like you're in the  entourage of a rock star.

A Temporary Respite

Miss Dionne will bound up most of the stairs in our house, but at least for the moment, she still finds it too scary to go down them.  This is wonderfully helpful for us, when we're working in the kitchen, for example, and want to make sure she doesn't wander very far (which involves going down stairs in most directions.)  It is deeply comforting to Tucker, who can escape her by going down some stairs.

Here's a glimpse into why he'd want to escape her:

Still Making Mistakes

Like the pain of childbirth labor, I forget certain aspects of raising a puppy as soon as they’re over. Case in point: how obsessed we become with the new pup’s elimination of waste products from his or her cuddly little body.

We weren’t always like this. Back in 1977 when we got our first dog, Astra, house-breaking seemed a somewhat mysterious process, one that involved scattering newspapers throughout the house and yelling at her whenever she failed to deposit her urine or feces on them. By the time we brought home our first CCI pup (Tucker, early in 2005), we’d already learned a lot. We knew that having the puppy sleep in a crate expedited the training process, since dogs instinctively dislike soiling their dens. We’d learned that you have to take the pup outside as soon as it wakes up and to praise it lavishly for performing. CCI refined our knowledge, instructing us that very young puppies usually need to pee at least once an hour (when they’re not sleeping), and that they need to “toilet” 10-15 minutes after eating or drinking. If you followed this regimen conscientiously, within a few months, you would have a young dog who never urinated or defecated in any indoor space and, miraculously, would reliably pee or poop (and sometimes both!) when given the verbal command to “hurry!”

Given all that we’ve learned, I’m not sure why Steve continues to get so upset every time a new puppy has an accident. I myself do not love when this happens; the thought of bringing armies of additional bacteria and viruses into my den does not make me happy. But every dog we’ve ever owned – before CCI and since – has eventually stopped pooping and peeing in the house. Steve continues to react as if something horrible has happened; as if we’ve failed in some fundamental way as puppy-raisers. 

And we continue to fail. Last night, for example, I’d had Dionne up in my office, playing with me for a while and then napping in the little kennel next to my desk.  Around 9, I woke her up, carried her down into Steve’s office, and offered to take her out to toilet before I went up to my bedroom to read. “No, I’ll take her back in a little while,” he responded.  So idiotically, we put her in the large kennel next to his desk – where a minute later, she peed.

Hurrying nicely, in response to the command. 

She’d defecated around 6 p.m., and then again a few hours later (that was a good save; I’d spotted her beginning to squat down, snatched her up, ran her outside, and heaped praised upon her for depositing her load on the patio.) So we weren’t concerned when she wouldn’t poop again on Steve’s last trip outside with her around 10 p.m.  The night went reasonably well, although when she started whining at 2 a.m., he took her out and she wouldn’t do anything except run around in the dark and pick up leaves to munch on.

By 6:15 she was squealing again, and Steve nobly took her out (pee but no poop), fed her breakfast, left her in the kennel in his office, and returned to bed where we dozed, exhausted, for another 40 minutes.  But when we went down to her kennel, she had pooped in it.  We’d screwed up yet again! Just five minutes ago, I suggested he take her back to pee again, even though she had peed a copious amount for me 35 minutes earlier (see photo). Five minutes later, he returned reported no action. He put her in the crate, and two minutes later she peed again. "You jerk!" he bellowed.  (He wasn't talking about himself.) 

Is this too boring to read about? It’s pretty tedious to live through. Maybe that’s why I forget it all the minute it ends.