How to Raise the Perfect Dog (31 page)

Submissive urination is usually found in fearful, nervous, or very submissive dogs that are sensitive and easily overwhelmed. They urinate under stress in a way to overcompensate, by showing complete submission and respect. If a dog is overly shy or submissive, make sure all new people she encounters practice the no touch, no talk, no eye contact rule until the puppy is ready to meet them. If someone in your household or immediate social circle has an overbearing, high-octane, or very assertive energy, that can also ignite the problem, even if your puppy is familiar with that person. Instruct people who seem to trigger your puppy’s issues to ignore the dog until it becomes absolutely clear that the puppy is comfortable with them.

9
SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

Adolescent Challenges

Mr. President in a car kennel

W
hen I first noticed that four-month-old Angel was already lifting his leg to pee and showing early signs of marking behavior, it felt to me like the canine equivalent of the time my nine-year-old son, Calvin, told me he thought it was about time he got himself a girlfriend. I felt that twinge so common to parents everywhere: the wistful realization that my children were growing up all too fast.

You won’t get a firm consensus from dog behaviorists about the exact moment when canine adolescence begins. The onset of this stage can begin as early as sixteen weeks—as with Angel’s premature marking behaviors—or it can begin to show as late as eight months of age. Generally, smaller dogs mature sooner than larger-breed dogs. Male and female dogs also tend to grow at different rates. I’m not a dog biologist, but from my years of experience, I’ve come to view a dog between six and eight months old as a “tween,” because at six months, the mating urge is just beginning to form. At six months of age, my sweet Angel turned into a little devil that started humping anything that moved, but because of his general puppy way of being, his behavior wasn’t threatening to the other dogs around him. If Angel were a human boy, this would be a little like his becoming curious about a
Playboy
magazine but unsure of what to do about it yet. I consider eight months to be the average age when true adolescence kicks in, a period of sometimes daring and unpredictable behavior that can drag on until your dog is two to three years of age. During this phase of his life, your dog’s brain is still maturing, but his body is nearly full grown. From six months to eight months, your dog will still look and act like a nice, big, cuddly puppy. But one day, you’ll wake up and suddenly you won’t see a puppy anymore. Your dog won’t play like a puppy. He won’t growl like a puppy. He won’t bark like a puppy.

“Only in adolescence did Eliza begin barking,” Chris Komives told me, when his wheaten terrier was nearly a year old. “It’s mostly in the house, so I think she’s become a little territorial now that she’s older. When she barks, I tell her no, and then ask her to go to her place and relax. Unfortunately, as an adolescent, she made up her own interpretation of that command. She learned to leap into the bay window, bark her head off at the dog passing by, then run to her place and lie down. I realized I’d confused dog training with dog psychology. We now correct her at the window and make her calm down at the spot where she became excited and started barking.”

Eliza’s “interpretation” of Chris’s command in order to suit her whim is a prime example of an adolescent dog who knows the basic rule book but is still trying to see how much she can get away with. As a puppy, your dog was reliant on your constant input and completely driven by the innate desire to follow you and to fit into your pack. An adolescent dog has a mind of its own. The dog begins to test every single limit that you’ve worked so hard to impose during those previous, formative eight months. If you waver from the program and your dog begins to believe that the rules apply only sometimes, you’ll risk establishing negative patterns of behavior that could haunt you for the rest of your dog’s life. If you go back to basics and stick to the guidelines you’ve already set, however, you will have the chance to establish an even deeper bond with your dog and to build a more mature, more meaningful connection.

I’m saddened by the harsh fact that far too many owners just give up and fold when a previously well-behaved or at least manageable puppy triples in size and starts pushing the envelope at the same time. The owners have been lulled into a sense of false security and suddenly feel they can’t handle all these new challenges. “You only have to look at the main age group of dogs surrendered to shelters,” says my friend Martin Deeley. “Eight months to two years.
¹
This is also the time a dog becomes a backyard dog because he causes too much trouble in the house. It is an indication that something changed in that period. What really happens is that after beginning well, owners relax because the pup is good, is small, and any developing issues are rationalized away as just being ‘puppy behavior.’ In a very short time the dog becomes larger, stronger, more mature mentally, sexually (if not neutered), and personality-wise more active or even hyper. Now we have the makings of a teenage rebel.” This is exactly why I urge my clients to focus on preventing issues or stopping them early on, before they become chronic. They must lay down a solid foundation of rules, boundaries, and limitations in puppyhood and never waver from those basic guidelines, no matter how big or defiant their adolescent dogs become.

PHYSICAL CHANGES

Your adolescent dog isn’t being willful just to spite you. There are a number of significant changes going on in his brain and in his body that are driving some of these frustrating new quirks in his behavior.

• His permanent teeth either are all the way in or finish coming in, so he goes through a second, sometimes more destructive, chewing phase.

• He may be growing so fast that he has literal “growing pains,” which can range from mild to severe.

• His defense drive begins to develop and mature, so fears he may still harbor from a younger age can show up again, as either shy or aggressive behaviors.

• Rapid growth causes joints and plates to become unstable and susceptible to injury, which means that certain vigorous activities may have to be put on hold until his body matures a little more.

• Older dogs begin to hold the adolescent dog more accountable than they did the puppy, which means new conflicts can develop, seemingly out of nowhere.
²

SEXUAL MATURITY

One of the hallmarks of this period is the dramatic rise in the role that sexual hormones play in fueling your dog’s behavior. An intact adolescent male dog produces testosterone at a rate several times higher than that of his adult counterpart, which means he will act out his urges in ways that may seem extreme or exaggerated unless he is neutered. Unneutered, a male dog will escalate his behaviors of territorial marking and roaming, and some will start displaying an aggression toward other male dogs—or even humans—that they didn’t exhibit during puppyhood. While sniffing another dog’s urine on a walk, the sexually intact male dog may fixate on it, stare off into the distance (tracking the direction of the dog that left the mark), and either seem unwilling to leave the landmark or act all too willing to tear off in pursuit of the mysterious female whose perfume still lingers. Even the best obedience training during puppyhood will often fail to temper this powerful urge.

The body of an unspayed female starts gearing up for its first heat cycle when she is only about six months old. If you’re looking for warning signs of your female preteen’s first heat, one of the earliest and most obvious will be the different ways that male dogs react to her—they’ll focus in on her right away, usually acting more agitated around her. The female starts sending a scent even before she is fully in heat; it’s nature’s invitation to male dogs to find and breed with her. Even these premature hormonal cues can aggravate competition and aggression in male dogs, and even neutered male dogs will show some reaction to it. The female in heat may also act a little more playful or “flirty” with males, standing very still with her tail straight up in the air like a flag to let them smell her. Some female dogs will show swelling in the vulva area, and once the heat begins, there is a little blood discharge. Frequent urination and touchiness—sort of a “canine PMS”—are also common red flags of estrus.

THE ETHICS OF SPAYING AND NEUTERING

Next to the food drive, the drive to mate is nature’s most powerful passion. A dog’s biology dictates that he or she mate every six months. When the mating urge is not fulfilled, incredible tension and frustration build up in the bodies of dogs—especially male dogs—that are often discharged as serious aggression. This is when the true primal predator self surfaces in previously peaceful dogs, and they can actually kill each other. In rural Mexico where I grew up, dogs don’t get neutered or spayed. The whole countryside becomes one giant dog park to them. They tend to live very instinctive lives because they do mate freely on the schedule nature intended. For these dogs, there is no sexual aggravation to turn into aggression. On one hand, this more natural lifestyle has created a terrible problem of dog overpopulation that developing nations desperately need to address; on the other hand, dogs in Third World countries definitely live much shorter lives than dogs in America.

Like their Mexican counterparts, dogs in America have both the ability and the desire to mate, but unlike them, they don’t have the opportunity. In the Westernized world, our lifestyle, our leash laws, and the way we’ve made dogs members of our families—not to mention the enormous tragedy of abandoned and homeless dogs in America—make it completely unrealistic for us to allow our pets to mate at will. That’s just reality. And that is why I firmly believe that here in America, spaying and neutering is the
only
ethical choice for those of us who are not professional breeders. We owe it to our dogs to prevent them from having to undergo the extreme physical and psychological suffering caused by not being able to mate when their bodies are screaming at them to do so.

When is the right time to spay or neuter your adolescent or “preteen” puppy? In my opinion, the ideal time is at six months of age. Almost all of your dog’s major growth has concluded by this point, but the sex hormones have not yet taken over driving his or her behavior. Some breeders of show dogs who are looking to mold perfect physical specimens believe in waiting a couple of months longer, to ensure that the dog has finished maturing physically. But I believe that by spaying and neutering at six months, we are blocking the brain from receiving those forceful signals from the hormone world. This way your dog never has to endure the suffering and frustration of needing to mate but lacking the opportunity.

There are so many myths about spaying and neutering—that it changes your dog’s personality, that it stunts your dog’s development, that it will make your dog fat. If I have earned any influence at all by my work as the Dog Whisperer, I want to use it to help dispel those myths. “There are so many health benefits to early spaying and neutering,” Dr. Rick Garcia, one of my favorite vets, agrees. “We’re preventing testicular cancers, mammary tumors, and other reproductive-system cancers; we’re preventing perianal hernias and blocking the development of many other conditions a dog can develop from having too many sex hormones building up in its system over a number of years. Some say that dogs are at more risk for obesity if they’re spayed or neutered, but if they are fed the correct diet and given regular exercise, there should be no issue with this at all.”

In my time in America, I have helped hundreds of dogs and owners better understand the operation and prepare psychologically for it. For every one of them, the process has been a positive experience. Nothing physically, psychologically, or spiritually negative has occurred from the operation. “The behavioral advantages are huge,” Dr. Garcia adds. “Neutering prevents marking with urine in the house and around the dog’s territory, and the accompanying aggression, which can lead to dominance issues and violence toward other dogs and even members of the family. Neutering them makes dogs more manageable, more trainable, and more placid pets at home. The only real downside to neutering is that you can’t breed the dog. Overall, the benefits far outweigh that.”

Of course, spaying and neutering do not promise you a “magic pill” to relieve all unwanted behaviors. Your role as a calm-assertive pack leader and your consistency in fulfilling all your dog’s other needs through exercise, discipline, and affection remain your only guarantees against bad habits or issues. But spaying and neutering do ensure that you are removing the rush of hormones to the brain that drives dogs to want to mate, as well as the consequences of their acting out of frustration when they can’t.

DADDY’S CANCER: A CAUTIONARY TALE

The issue of spaying and neutering became an even more passionate cause for me after my pit bull, Daddy, developed a cancerous transmissible venereal tumor. He survived this life-threatening disease but had to endure surgery, several days of chemotherapy, and an intensive follow-up holistic regimen with Dr. Marty Goldstein to help his body recover from the toxic aftereffects of all the chemo. Daddy was twelve years old at the time and had not been neutered because Daddy’s legal owner, a rapper named Redman, was very much against the procedure. Even though he truly did love Daddy, Redman’s desire to leave him intact came from an emotional place. With good intentions, he wanted Daddy to have the experience of siring puppies, but Redman forgot to ask himself the question, “When I’m
not
breeding Daddy, how’s that going to affect his quality of life? What will become of that frustration and that powerful drive to mate?”