This is my first Guest Blog Post by my very good friend, Sarah. I am certain you will smile at this post, she is one funny lady!!
Hello! I’m Sarah and I’m Claire’s first ‘guest blogger’ – how exciting (sort of). I’ve thought a lot about this post and what I wanted to do has changed so many times. But first – how do I and why do I know Claire and the lovely Ben?
Funnily enough we met on Facebook. I had noticed Claire’s name around on some of the popular dog groups and then one day I shared a post about a person’s puppy being attacked by two dogs in a local park. This is when Claire posted on the thread and messaged me asking for more details…..I didn’t have any unfortunately but we got chatting. It’s a funny old world. We got chatting about one of the most current and hotly debated topics in the dog world – diet! Dun Dun Duhhhh! But luckily, we were in agreement – Claire fed her dog a raw diet and I wanted to feed my soon-to-be puppy a raw diet. From this we got onto my concerns (already!) on leaving my puppy when I was at work. The plan was that my partner (who owns his own business) would eventually take said puppy to work with him once he had grown up a bit – but in the meantime he would be at home with me coming home at lunchtime. This didn’t seem enough to us and luckily Claire offered to help us – we’ve never looked back. We are now very firm friends and pretty much meet up at least every few days! We are officially CDL’s*!
But where am I going with this? My first lesson – everyone NEEDS a Claire if you are a first time dog/puppy owner. And why will become clear as I go on!
So, who is this little bundle of fluff who would be joining our small family? Of course, it was Robert, our then 9 week old West Highland White Terrier, weighing in at 1.9kg on arrival to our home and bringing a whole shake up of our sedate and easy world! Why a puppy? Why a Westie? Why ‘Robert’? I hear you say! Well:
· We are first time dog owners and felt like a rescue – with their possibly difficult backgrounds would be too much for us. To be honest I’m not sure how prepared you can be for a puppy so we were; I totally admit it, pretty darned naïve.
· Not sure why a Westie – I just always wanted one, when I pictured myself with a dog it was always a Westie and we wanted a small but hardy dog – this breed seemed to fit the bill.
· His full name is actually Robert Barnaby Brown-Grant! But Robert, Rob, Robbie, Bob, Bobby, *?*!! – This was mainly because my partner thought it would be funny to call in a field…..
So we finally brought little Robert home and little did we or he know what we had in store in spite of the months (probably more like years) of preparation we had done! I could write on and on about our journey so far but I’m worried I’ve probably already lost some of you. So I will cover what we are (we really hope!) currently winning at in the great raising of a puppy experience and what we are now facing at the interesting age of 8 months old…..
So winning? We are winning at crate training! Hurrah – because it was HARD! So you buy a puppy, bring it home, put it in its crate when you go out and at night and dah-dah it is safe and happy…..well apparently not, not to begin with anyway! The first week was the hardest, and we were tricked on our first day home – we got little Robert home and immediately he found his crate and went to sleep in it – great success!
We decided to go with the approach of trying to make the crate the loveliest, most fun place to be and during the day Robert would jump in and out for treats galore happy as larry! It was only later when it was bed time did we realise…..he was put in and the crying started. The crying was horrible and doing my nut in – I’d be at work and convinced I could hear him crying…..
However so far, we hadn’t locked the crate door – he had free roam of the kitchen with paper down and the kitchen door closed. Mistake number 1 (and I realise some may not agree, that’s fine). It was only after a week that I turned to Claire (see you need one of her!) desperate for sleep and with my heart being torn and she said – close the crate door.
Close it? Really? Won’t that make it worse? I was desperate, so I did it, and ok we had some instances in the future of some more howls but on the whole he was so much better. She also recommended covering the crate and getting up in the middle of the night for toileting – I started with twice a night (there is a little more to this technique but for the reason of not blabbing on – you can contact Claire and she will point you to the resources). This slowly reduced to once a night and later and later and eventually not at all. We have had one wee accident (no no.2’s) in his crate EVER. I think that is pretty remarkable**. We also leave Robert in his crate during the day, this was started super gradually from a few minutes to around a max of 3-4 hours – he found it tough at the very beginning but now he’s totally happy for a few hours to snooze in his crate and/or have his fave tasty kong in there.
So now, he loves his crate. He takes himself there during the day for sleeps and at bed time often takes himself off…..its brilliant. I feel justified gloating because it has been really hard and I really struggled – there have been slip ups along the way and I’m not sure what I would have done without Claire’s reassurance and advice (thanks mate J) but now we’re sailing smooth its fab :D!
As a somewhat symptom of winning at crate training we are also winning at house training! Hurrah! And at first, yes it was hard and messy. But we have an old carpet and got him at the beginning of summer – we knew what to expect. We lifted and popped him outside all the time, after playing, eating, sleeping and every 20 mins in between. We rewarded hugely for doing it outside and ignored when he did it inside. He only did no. 2’s inside a few times before he ‘got it’. We also attached a word/phrase which has been really helpful and I recommend any new puppy owners to do the same as he can pretty much toilet on cue now- very handy when in a rush! We say ‘hurry ups’ if you are interested J. As I said, the crate helped a lot because he didn’t want to ‘go’ in his den. So, it was a case of open the crate and go outside STRAIGHT AWAY – it worked! Finally we have also taught Robert to let us know he wants to go out by ringing a bell at the back door……marvellous…..now he’s an adolescent its super fun because he rings it when he’s bored too ;) hey no one is perfect!
Those are our biggest ‘winning’ events in the last 6 months – to achieve those has made life so much easier! But on top we have managed to pretty much curb the puppy biting, he has lots of doggy friends and he knows a bunch of tricks (sit, down, turn both ways, speak, paw, high five, touch, go to the mat, up - to name a few!!). We clicker train Robert and he’s responded to it really easily! He’s now so easy to live with, everyone has their crappy days but having Robert in our family has enriched our lives tenfold.
So at this moment in time we’re getting to the really good stuff, Robert is now 8 months old. His ‘boys’ have well and truly made themselves known…….he’s distracted, mischievous and feisty. Other things that have changed are that I am now working from home which is blissful for Robert and my partner is also based at home. So how have our lives changed now that we don’t have a ‘puppy puppy’ anymore but an ‘adolescent puppy’? Well lots….and I hope you will be here for the next installment to read NOT how we are losing (far too negative) but how we are really really trying hard on some stuff!
Thanks to all you lovely Ben followers – speak soon J
Sarah and Robert J
*Crazy Dog Ladies!
**I felt it only fair to add that we did do the ‘tough love’ approach to the crate; I know not all people agree with this. We left him to cry, it was never for hours, but we did leave him. This is a whole different debate that I won’t get into – I understand all viewpoints. It worked for us.
