How to Raise the Perfect Dog (6 page)

Chris Komives filming a dog up close

Sometimes when we’re joking around on
Dog Whisperer
locations, I like to lighten the mood by pondering what breed my human pack members might’ve been if they’d been born dogs. Curly-haired cameraman Chris Komives is
definitely
a terrier, in both looks and behavior. Chris is the guy who goes in before I arrive and gets all the close-up “bad behavior” footage, and he is relentless about getting exactly the right shot, no matter the difficulty, discomfort, or even danger. He himself admits he’s a bit of an obsessive personality. It took a lot of work for me to teach him how to approach unstable dogs, patiently ignore them, use “no touch, no talk, no eye contact,” and wait beside them in a quiet, calm-assertive state for as long as it takes until they relax, get used to him, and get used to the bulky high-definition video camera he carries. Chris has taken all my lessons seriously and has become an excellent amateur assessor of dog behavior. Sometimes he will arrive at a house and the owner will say, “Don’t get near her, my dog is dangerous!” Chris is usually able to tell if that’s really the case or if it’s the owner that’s causing the situation. Usually once Chris gets to be alone with the dog and follows all my protocols, everything is fine.

After shooting five seasons of
Dog Whisperer
with me, Chris and his wife, Johanna, a senior policy analyst at the Government Accountability Office, were eager to get some hands-on practice with a dog of their own. They decided they wanted the fulfilling and challenging experience of raising a puppy together.

“Never having had our own dog before, we wanted to experience one from start to finish,” Chris told me. “We also wanted to maximize the amount of time we’d have the dog in our lives, so that meant a puppy. When it came time to choose a breed, having seen so many types of dogs on the show gave me a lot of direction into the type of dog for us. Since Cesar had told me if I were a dog, I’d be a terrier, that’s the group we looked into.”

Chris and Johanna researched terrier breeds and decided they wanted a soft coated wheaten terrier.
⁴
They chose to go the breeder route, rather than seek a rescue or a shelter dog. “By choosing a purebred with known lineage, we were confident in avoiding expensive vet bills for the life of the dog. Working with Cesar also gave us credibility with some of the breeders with whom we were applying. Some breeders are reluctant to give a purebred like a soft coated wheaten terrier to a first-time dog owner because of their concern for the quality of life of the puppy. When I answered the application questions so specifically, the breeder wanted to know how I had such extensive dog knowledge. When I told her I was a cameraman on
Dog Whisperer
, the deal was done!”

But Chris and Johanna are a busy, two-career couple. In planning for the arrival of their new puppy, Eliza, they soon realized their entire lifestyle was going to have to change. “I knew from Cesar what we were in for, and that we’d be making a lot of changes and a few sacrifices, too. I actually took two full weeks off work to be home with Eliza while she adjusted to our house. I knew from Cesar that the puppy needed at least two long walks a day, and we never varied from that. I got up an hour earlier than usual every day in order to walk her, and in the evening, I walked her again before feeding. That routine has continued to this day. When I had to go back to work, we hired a dog walker twice a week to take her out in the afternoons. Though it wasn’t always possible with my shooting schedule, I tried to get home at lunchtime whenever I could to let her out of her crate on days when the dog walker wasn’t booked.” To make sure that Eliza was never crated more than four hours at a time, Johanna arranged to work from home on the days the dog walker wasn’t available or when Chris was shooting too far away to make it home in the afternoons.

Chris Komives with Eliza

KOMIVES FAMILY SCHEDULE FOR ELIZA’S FIRST MONTHS

5:30 a.m.: Wake up, walk Eliza, obedience/agility/other challenges in short intervals.

6:15 a.m.: Return, feed Eliza, shower, and get ready for work.

7:00 a.m.: Put Eliza in back hallway, go to work.

7:30 a.m.—4:30 p.m.: At work—check on Eliza’s webcam. Twice a week, dog walker takes Eliza with pack around 12 noon for one hour.

5:00 p.m.: Return home, walk Eliza, obedience/agility/other challenges in short intervals.

6:00 p.m.: Feed Eliza.

7:00 p.m.—9:00 p.m.: Eat dinner, keep Eliza on her “place,” groom Eliza (brushing, trim nails, clean ears, etc.).

10:00 p.m.: Put Eliza in back hallway, go to bed.

“I knew from my on-the-job training, so to speak, that the first six months are vital for establishing the routine with the puppy as well as the rules,” Chris recalls, “so I became very focused on raising and caring for her—unfortunately, to the detriment of my other relationships. I tend to have a somewhat obsessive personality anyway, and I channeled this into Eliza. After a month or so, Johanna requested we find something else to talk about besides the dog.”

As the Komiveses learned, puppies require commitment, focus, and energy. If you are not prepared to care for a dog for the rest of its life, then please don’t fall for an adorable face and bring a puppy home on a whim. But the good news is, raising your dog from puppyhood is your best chance at creating the kind of intimate human-dog bond that we all dream about. Puppies are born without issues, and if they are raised by a good canine mother for the first eight weeks of their lives, they usually come to you unscathed by the quirks and neuroses that bother many an adult dog. Puppies come with a built-in leash attached, because they are programmed to
follow
. They also naturally seek stability and balance, and they are hungry to learn and absorb the rules, boundaries, and limitations of your family pack. Putting the right time and dedication into the first eight months of your puppy’s life offers you an incredible opportunity to nurture and influence the dog of your dreams—your faithful companion for a lifetime.

WHERE TO FIND A PUPPY

“How much is that doggie in the window?”

Actually, the cost of that puppy—to animal welfare and to society—is far higher than simply the dollar amount on the price tag.

There are three legitimate ways to go about adopting a puppy—from a shelter, from a breeder, or from a rescue organization. But many a softhearted dog lover has been lured by the winsome puppies in the windows and cages of the chain and independent pet stores that dot the streets of American cities and the aisles of our sprawling shopping malls. Most well-meaning animal lovers who purchase a dog from a pet shop or over the Internet or from a classified ad are unaware that those same puppies may be among the hundreds of thousands in America having been raised in horrendous, unsanitary, inhumane conditions in factory-like atmospheres known as puppy mills.

“I’ve been inside a lot of puppy mills, from one end of the country to the other,” says my friend Chris DeRose, founder of Last Chance for Animals, a nonprofit activist group that works as a kind of “animal FBI,” gathering prosecutable evidence of systemic animal cruelty through detective work, whistle-blower information, and undercover operations. “And the one thing I can tell you is, puppy mills are ugly.” In most puppy mills, dogs live and die in their own excrement. Because they spend their early lives trapped inside wire cages, sometimes their feet get caught, and they lose paws and limbs to injuries and infections that are never treated. There is no regular veterinary care, and the dogs aren’t tested for genetic health problems, so chronic eye, ear, and digestive tract infections are common. Many puppy mills that exist in areas with extreme temperatures have no heating or air-conditioning, so the dogs routinely die from overexposure to heat or cold. The worst sufferers in puppy mills are the breeding pairs, the mothers in particular. They are forced to produce litter after litter, until they are physically used up. Then they are disposed of—often with unimaginable violence and cruelty.

What’s often ignored in the puppy mill discussion is the significant role that a puppy mill background plays in the growing epidemic of serious behavior problems we see in America’s dogs. I’ve been called in to help dozens of dogs whose troubling behaviors I can pretty accurately trace back to their having been born under these oppressive conditions. That’s because dogs raised in puppy mills don’t have a natural style of life during the first weeks and months that are most crucial to their normal physical and mental development. They can’t learn how to be dogs, because their mothers don’t know how to be dogs. Recently, Chris DeRose took me inside my first puppy mill to help rescue and rehabilitate some of its saddest victims, the ones these so-called breeders were willing to relinquish to us (after all, these dogs were already so damaged, they would never make them any money). I saw dogs that were at such a high level of stress and anxiety, they didn’t know how to calm down—ever. I saw dogs trembling with shock, depressed dogs, sick dogs—even hopeless dogs. Anyone who has ever owned a normal, upbeat, joyful dog knows that hopelessness is a very aberrant quality for a dog—especially a puppy—to exhibit. It was a truly sobering and life-changing experience for me.

Cesar with the Last Chance for Animals team and some rescued puppy-mill dogs
.

I am a big believer in the theory that the mental health and environmental stresses placed on a mother (of any species) play a role in the issues her offspring inherit. Imagine a female dog, like her mother and grandmother before her, raising litter after litter of puppies, never leaving the confines of a 4-foot-by-4-foot wire cage. Her puppies are going to come into the world stressed, and they’re going to get more and more anxious as the weeks go by and they absorb their mother’s unstable, depressed, or jittery energy. Once that puppy gets to the pet shop window, she may look adorable, but the deck is already stacked against her. Because of the inborn behavioral (not to mention physical) problems that will show up more as the puppy grows out of her cute stage, this dog is more than likely to end up abandoned at a shelter and possibly put to death. Why should the puppy mill owners (and pet shop owners) care? They’ve already pocketed their money.

I was doing a seminar in Atlanta, Georgia, last year when a rescue group there presented me with a little female Yorkie with extreme anxiety, fear aggression, and a host of other behavioral problems. She was a puppy mill dog. This little girl was going to be put down unless someone stepped in. I ended up bringing her back to Los Angeles with me, and now she’s a member of my home-based family pack. In the beginning, even my normally very patient wife threw up her hands in frustration at her behavior. “Georgia Peaches,” as we named her, spent all her time hiding in corners and under and behind furniture, aggressively attacking anyone who got near her. She peed and pooped wherever she stood—even in her kennel. Puppy mill dogs have only one option—to pee where they sleep—something healthy dogs never do in nature. Eventually I was able to rehabilitate her so that she is no longer a behavior problem. She is still somewhat tentative, but she lives and plays happily with our other dogs and doesn’t show any of the signs of stress or aggression she did when she first arrived. She’s not human-aggressive anymore. But as far as housebreaking goes, she is still a work in progress. Growing up in a puppy mill kills off even the deepest instincts of many dogs.

Many well-meaning people suspect that a pet store puppy may have been raised in a puppy mill but buy it anyway, honestly believing they are doing a good thing by “rescuing” an individual puppy. I can understand that line of thinking—most of us who love dogs cannot stand to see
any
dog, especially a puppy, go without a loving home. But according to Stephanie Shain of the Humane Association of the United States, “All these well-meaning people are doing is opening up another cage for yet another puppy mill dog to fill. It’s all about economics; it’s all about money. If people stop buying puppy mill puppies, the puppy mills stop making money.”