I am obsessed with potty training the dog. It is now my full-time occupation, and I have pretty much cornered the market in paper towel, pee pads and those little plastic doggie poop bags. I need to get an actual life.
Before we even got the dog, people were flooding us with advice.
"Praise her when she goes outside. Use positive reinforcement." So did you think I would use negative reinforcement for going potty outside? I mean, I'm no expert, but even I know that smacking her on the nose for pottying outside is probably not the way to go.
"Have a special cue you use to get her to go quickly." So having a bladder the size of a gnat and drinking a super gulp won't do it alone? Maybe saying pretty please with Beggin' Strips on top will help?
"Learn her schedule and get her outside before she has to go." I'm thinking I probably could have figured that one out myself the first time she peed on my carpet.
All of this advice was well-intentioned and seemed pretty much basic knowledge, which I foolishly imagined the dog would know too. I could not have been more wrong.
Positive reinforcement? For kids, a simple "good job", or a thumbs-up seems to work. For the dog? Every tinkle earns a party complete with hats, streamers and kazoos. If she makes number two? Well then, we set off fireworks, strike up the band and erupt into a full-on Broadway showstopper number. And, being only a puppy, she still sometimes decides to pee on my carpet. Yea team!
As I understand it, my mother potty trained me by telling me not to use the potty. I believe she threatened dire consequences if I even thought of using it. Training done. To this day, I have never gone anywhere but the potty and I am not scarred for life (well, I am, but that's another blog about my mother).
However, my child, being a dog, I've been advised that this is most likely not the way to go, and if I fail to perform my bizarre little happy, happy, yea, yea, rah, rah ritual, she will feel the need to forever decorate my floors with brown and yellow until they resemble a really gross inkblot test.
On to the next bit of advice. Special cue? Hmmm. Inside it seems the special cue is her being awake, unless she is sitting on a pee pad. Then, her bladder expands to the size of Texas. Surely I don't want her to pee there? What is she an animal?
Outside, she has to sniff every blade of grass, piece of mulch, patch of dirt and section of blacktop in order to find the perfect place to do her business. I'm convinced that, instead of being concerned about what the writings of Nostradamus might tell us regarding the end of the world, we'd be better off worrying about the dog being forced to potty on the wrong side of the driveway. Life as we know it would come to a screeching halt. It would be Armageddon!
And while she is determining the fate of the world? I am standing on the sidelines like a demented cheerleader chirping, "Hurry up! Hurry up!" It's demeaning to both of us, but only I seem to realize it.
As for the last bit of advice regarding her schedule? Yeah. Eat. Potty. Drink. Potty. Sleep. Potty. Play. Potty. Blink. Potty. Breathe. Potty. It's not so much a schedule as it is a sprint for the door eighty-two thousand times a day with poop bags in one hand, the dog in the other and the bottle of Nature's Miracle clenched between my teeth. You don't want to know where the paper towels are.
We had several people suggest "bell training", where you hang a strand of jingle bells on the door and ring them every time you take the dog out to potty. The theory is that the dog will eventually learn to ring them herself whenever she has to go out and...voila!...no more messes inside.
We were pleasantly surprised that this actually seemed to be working, but before we could break our arms patting ourselves on our own backs, we realized that what was working was the theory, not necessarily the actual bells.
While the bells meant "potty" to us, they apparently meant, "Hey, I really feel like seeing what's going on outside" to the dog.
Jingle, jingle, jingle. I want to eat grass.
Jingle, jingle, jingle. Hey, is that a bird out there that I need to try and catch?
Jingle, jingle, jingle. Is it cold out, warm out, raining?
Jingle, jingle, jingle. Is the sun still shining like it was fifteen seconds ago when I was last out?
Jingle, jingle, jingle. I know I've done this sixty-seven times in a row while you are trying to do something else and I didn't have to potty, but this time I actually have to. Honest.
Jingle, jingle, jingle. It's freakin' Christmas every day at our house. Yeah, the bells are working all right, but I think the dog is training us. We actually both flinch now when someone even mentions Christmas or Santa.
I know that all of this is probably good advice and that eventually the dog will be potty trained, but at this point, I'm not sure that will happen before the bells "accidentally" get run over by a steamroller and I fit the dog with a diaper. Or perhaps I should just replace my carpets with topsoil, mulch and grass.
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