My Raven is a demon, a hell beast. She is sweet and friendly, but extremely destructive. She is happy and playful, but she loves to destroy anything and everything. Except dog toys. If it was designed to be chewed on by a dog, she has no interest. I have had her 5 weeks. She has learned how to sit, briefly. She is coming to me when called, but not reliably. If she is not in her crate, she wants to chew the walls, furniture, books, shoes, hands, arms, anything she can get in her mouth.
I got the book Perfect Puppy in 7 Days by Dr. Sophia Yin. It has a lot of good information and helpful ideas. It is mostly geared toward a puppy that is younger than Raven was when I got her. Maybe, since Raven was about 6 months old when I got her, we had passed a critical window. I do like Dr. Yin’s concept of learn to earn, where the puppy has to do her training exercises in order to get any food. It is helping, but after more than 7 days, Raven is far from perfect.
It’s not critically important to me that Raven should win any good citizen awards. What I would really like is for her not to be a danger to herself. I literally cannot take my eyes off of her for a second. I have already had to spend more than $1,000 on her for veterinary care for an illness. Tests showed it was not parvovirus. They couldn’t determine an exact cause, but they said it could be from ingesting a toxin, possibly mushrooms. One day, I caught her in the act. She was eating Madrona berries. She would be sniffing around in the leaves, where I didn’t see any berries. She didn’t really seem to be eating anything. I wasn’t quite sure, so I pried open her mouth and saw she was eating the little orange berries. She was being sneaky about it, using her nose to sniff out the hidden berries under the fallen leaves. I am not positive her illness was caused by these berries, but it seems like the most likely explanation. It’s a demonstration of how she would be a danger to herself if not monitored every second of every day. I’m sure she would chew through an electrical cord and electrocute herself. She would get on the counter and grab something potentially toxic. Our house is not puppy proof, but even if the house was entirely empty, I’m sure she would eat the walls.
Dr. Yin’s methods are helping me make some slow progress, but nothing like she shows in her examples. She talks about teaching “Leave it.” That has been very difficult for Raven, although we have made a little progress. Before using Dr. Yin’s strategy, I couldn’t ever leave anything on the ground for a fraction of a second and expect Raven to leave it. Chomp, chomp, chomp, everything went in her mouth, edible or not. Now, I have had some success getting her to drop things. Even if I had a younger dog, without such a drive to destroy, she talks about a dog’s development way outside of a 7 day period, from birth to her first birthday. That seems perfectly legitimate, but don’t make the title of your book Perfect Puppy in 7 Days. I think you would need to consider a puppy’s development and continued training. The title of the book seems to imply that you could train your puppy for seven days and you would basically be done. Really, even if you have a dog that responds rapidly to the training, the first week would just be the start, and you would expect to keep training your dog for a long time, possibly her entire life. Maybe certain puppies, if caught at the right stage, could become perfect in 7 days, and stay that way with minimal refresher training. I might recommend this book for someone who has an already pretty good puppy. Such persons probably wouldn’t be looking for a book on puppy training, if their dogs were already pretty easy to get along with. I guess I dont need a book called Perfect Puppy in 7 Days. I need a book called, How You and Your Hell Beast Puppy Can Manage to Survive the First Year.
Besides apparently not being the right book for Raven and me, I have other complaints. The formatting is not very professional, or reader-friendly. The photos are small, and the layout is ugly. Many of the photos really don’t demonstrate the behavior very clearly. One photo in particular really creeped me out. Also, she talks about picking up a young puppy and holding her in an awkward position she doesn’t like, and forcing her to stay there even if she growls. I would not recommend this book to anyone, even if they have a relatively easy puppy, just based on that bit of bad advice. On Amazon, this book has a rating of 4.4 out of 5, from 2,500 ratings. Apparently a lot of people like the book. Although I liked many of the underlying ideas, the flaws of this book are too many to overlook. It certainly hasn’t made Raven a perfect puppy in seven days. We will keep searching for better training advice.
Mu was a challenging puppy, too, and I needed to keep him on a leash in the house to keep him from harassing the other dogs or destroying things. Mu is still a scoundrel. He still enjoys destroying things on a daily basis. Mu has been trained to be one of the best, if not the best cat-detection dog on the entire planet. He has saved many lives and found hundreds of missing cats. He is a very good dog in spite of his enjoyment of being naughty. If Raven becomes a great search dog and also is a challenge to live with, I would be happy with that. I just hope that we can both survive to see that day.
P.S. We have FOUR dogs in the pack. It's just that the other two are practically sedated librarians by comparison.
I feel your pain! My youngest two, now almost three, were quite the challenges as youngsters, too. Panda McHellion and Walter McHooligan. They still are in some ways. The boy is 37% a blend of four Hounds, 13% Husky, plus ten other breeds. I'm sure the girl has some Labby mixed in with the Hound as she is a confirmed fetchaholic. There really needs to be a law about any one organism being allowed THAT much energy. It's not fair to the rest of us. These two were paws down the worst little buggers for eating anything and everything they could find. We wound up having to remove all toxic shrubs and plants from the dog yard, and I got a really good working knowledge of what plants were toxic at what level. I practically had Chewy Ask-A-Vet on speed dial. They dug up roots and chewed on them, yanked bark off trees, unearthed buried hickory nuts as a snack, chewed up two welcome mats, part of the kitchen island, a chunk of the living room rug, and goodness remembers what else. I was keeping a Puppy Destruction Tally, but, understandably, I lost count. True to his Houndy inventiveness, problem solving, and food motivation, my boy kept getting into the cupboards. We put barrel locks on the cupboards. He figured out how to open them. Then he stopped getting into the cupboards. It was as if he just wanted me to know he had the ability to do it, like he had won the game, really. He used this new skill to open the barrel locks on the custom made kitchen gate, too, just to prove a point. They couldn't reach my bamboo windchimes on the porch, so they dragged over one of the folding chairs, got up on it, took the windchimes down and THEN chewed them. Then there was the way the dogs mysteriously kept getting back into the house once we had put them out in their fenced yard. At first, we figured we had simply not pushed the door all the way to click in, so we started double checking that we had. Then one day while the dogs were out, I was peacefully vacuuming the sunroom when I received a launched greeting of exuberant paws in the middle of my back announcing, "We're back in now, Mom! Hooray!" A little detective work later we found out my Hound boy had figured out how to turn the door knob and push. All that aside, crazy lunatic rescue mutts make THE best stories, and the memories of a lifetime to stay with you forever. I wouldn't trade these two wingnuts for anything!