The Dog Blog

Last weekend The New York Times Magazine had a fascinating article about how we treat our dogs today.  I recommend everyone take a look at this and just think about it for a while.  Like most things, there is some good stuff there along with a few things that I disagree with. 

I take issue with the authors idea that dogs should be "relegated to the basement and the back porch" but I do support her when she says that dogs should be expected to "earn their keep as retrievers and ratters".  I’ve always been an advocate of having a JOB for the dogs to do and I think that with that comes a better human-dog understanding.

Take for instance my dog Gwennie.  She is a beautiful thing, a lovely Welsh Springer that is four years old.  Gwennie is not the brightest dog in the world and she was a real bear to train when she was a puppy but she has two jobs that she does around the house and she does them very well.  First, and this is not very taxing, she is the pretty dog of the group.  She’s calm, pleasant, and pretty and is just the kind of dog you want to follow you everywhere.  I trained her to do that, follow me EVERYWHERE.  Second, Gwennie’s real job is to close the front door whenever we come inside.  She does this every time we come in and she loves doing it.  She’ll whip around after we go inside, check to see that all the other dogs are in, and then push the door closed with a nice satisfying shove.  It took her a while to learn this job but now that she knows it she can’t really settle in in the evening until she closed the door after us.

 Long digression there, but if you read the article you’ll see that the author doesn’t like how we make our pets "Prima-Donnas".  What I have to say there is that even Prima-Donnas have jobs they can do that make them better members of dog society.  Heck, if Gwennie can find a job, any dog can.

Steve Haynes

Austin dog trainer

Fidelio Dog Works

Austin, Tx.

512.231.8095 

Well, not all dogs live the life of the back yard, some not only have to be house trained but they also need to be trained how and where their potty is on their private jets.

This one isn’t new to me, I’ve dealt with clients that took their dogs on long trips in their planes before but the approach we took this time was a bit different.

Since my client was going to be flying for over 6 hours at a time and they had a young puppy we needed a solution to keep the dog from messing up the carpets on their Gulfstream. After running through the ideas about Wee pads (they smell and often leak) and the unpalatable idea of keeping the pup in it’s crate for that long a period, we started thinking about having some real live turf in the plane. Well, as luck would have it, there is a market for this idea and it’s already been done. There is a wonderful lady I found in Los Angeles (where else would she be) that designs boxes which hold squares of real live growing sod for use as puppy bathrooms. What genius. It seems that the movie and music A list have been successfully using these things for quite some time backstage, in their set trailers, and on their planes.

These sod boxes, accurately and appropriately called PoochPotties are a great idea for a couple of really neat reasons:

First, we generally want to teach puppies that pottying on grass is the only acceptable surface for releiving itself, and the PoochPotty does that by using real grass.

Second, once the grass in the PoochPotty is messed up enough (you know what I mean) you just yank it out, toss the piece(s) of sod, and drop in new ones. Your pup is always getting the reinforcement of potty training on reall grass. The cool thing about this is that PoochPotty will supply you with new sod if you live in L.A., New York, or Chicago, or have fresh grass waiting for you at whichever airport you set your plane down. Alas, here in Austin we’ll just be running down to the garden supply store to pick up some new pieces when we need them. Easy enough!

For my clients that are really having difficulty house training their pups I’m going to start recommending a PoochPotty for the more pedestrian use in the home. The idea that we can now associate grass with going to the bathroom while the pup is still in the family room is just too compelling for this dog trainer to pass up. Steve Haynes Austin Dog Trainer Fidelio Dog Works 512.231.8095