Well, I finally managed to get Charley’s attention this morning. How? By flying into a stratospheric rage and yelling at him for about 30 minutes, that’s how.
He now seems to understand “NO!” “STAY GODDAMMIT!!!” “OFF!” “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!” and “STAY AWAY FROM THAT THING!!!!!!!!!”
The “NO!” part has been a long time coming.
During the week he’s resided at my house, he has pretty well dismantled a $5,000 irrigation system. This morning I caught him contentedly chewing on the fourth dripper sprinkler of the week (you can get little sprayers to attach to dripper hoses, which work a lot more efficiently than the stupid drippers that have to run 8 or 10 hours to put enough water on a plant to keep it alive in 110-degree heat). He loves those things. He chews them off the dripper hose and then carries them to a comfortable spot where he can lay down and chew them into plastic confetti, presumably swallowing a fair number of chunks of plastic in the process.
Did I mention the vet bills for his chronic digestive upset? Did I happen to talk about the extravagantly expensive special food and the future of having to prepare 14 pounds of dog food a week in the kitchen of whichever house he ends up occupying, now and forevermore?
Oh. No…I see I didn’t.
The dog has had intermittent diarrhea since M’hijito got him from the breeder. He’s been tested for parasites and infections repeatedly, always negative. Just before M’hijito left on vacation, the vet put him on one of the blindingly expensive Hill’s P/D canned diets and handed M’hijito an expensive prescription and an expensive bottle of probiotics and then told him to feed the dog chicken and rice after the P/D runs out. Permanently.
So on the morning appointed for him to leave for San Diego, my son showed up with the dog, the dog’s mattress, a crate of staggeringly expensive canned dog food, instructions to feed a full can each morning and another full can each evening, a lifetime supply of Costco chicken thighs, and a sack of bulk rice from Sprouts that needed a camel to carry it into the house. He handed me a hundred-dollar bill with which to purchase more lifetime supplies of meat while he’s gone.
So most of the week I’ve been cooking dog food, which Charley consumes at an incredible rate. He’s getting better (although if he actually has IBS, the least drastic of the possibilities, my yelling at him for half an hour or 45 minutes will give him a relapse), and I think he may have regained some of the 4 pounds (that’s 6% of his body weight!) he lost during the last episode.
Meanwhile he’s chewed up at least four sprayers and drippers and snipped off lengths of hose at the ground, making it damn near impossible to repair the damage.
Several of these things, I can NOT find. They were installed before the plants grew up, so they’re hidden underneath shrubbery, where Charley can insinuate himself but I can’t even see. To aggravate things, the water pressure in his favorite part of the system is weak to begin with, so when I turn the system on, I can’t spot any geysers that would tell me where the broken parts are. Underneath there, the break that’s closest to the main is dribbling away, and everything downstream from that is dry as a bone.
This means I won’t find the broken parts until my (established! years old!!!!) plants goddamn DIE.
After I yelled until my throat hurt this morning, I went out and fought with the system for an hour—at 5:30 in the morning it was at least relatively cool out there. Yesterday while I was running around the city I bought a dozen new sprinkler gadgets and so was able to replace the ones in the potted plants (sort of…he’d shortened the dripper hoses enough that I couldn’t position them where they’d get all the pots) and dig a dripper that was watering a spot where a cape honeysuckle had been removed and seal it off and bury the dripper hose (which Gerardo’s ignorant sidekick will soon dig up again…he pulls that stuff up from the crushed granite and then just leaves it sitting there, the idiot).
The drippers are as nothing compared to the late-model kitchen cabinetry, into which Charley has dug great gouges in spite of having been told OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF to the point of blueness in the face. Yes, he does know what off means. He knows what no means. He knows what stay means. He will do those things when it suits him. Problem is, it rarely suits him.
And when it doesn’t suit him, he simply ignores the human in question.
Anyway, one of the cabinet doors now needs to be replaced. God only knows what THAT will cost. Those are custom cabinets that Satan and Proserpine ordered from Home Depot.
Interestingly, after this period of throat-scorching nuclear eruption, the dog responded to NO! by leaving it, by stopping, by not proceeding with whatever he was focused on doing. He responded to OFF! by sitting quietly with a contrite and respectful look on his doggy face. He responded to STAY! by actually staying long enough for me to dodge out the door. And he responded to STAY AWAY FROM THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!! and to MINE, GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!! by standing down from his contemplated exploit.
Temporarily.
I should be ashamed for yelling at a helpless dog. But I’m not. And he’s not.
Heh, looks like your son got himself a dog worth his weight in silver. At this rate soon he will be worth his weight in gold.
@Stephen: LOL!
After Anna the Ger-Shep (for whom I paid $1,000) ate an arm off a leather chair, SDXB took to calling her “The Thousand-Dollar-a-Day Dog.” Well…I suppose he was right, since I bought a minivan to cart her around town in. 😀 That pushed up the lifetime cost of ownership to 14 grand. Not counting the leather chair…
M’hijito paid $2,000 for Charley, so he’s already worth more than his weight in silver. I suppose we could start calling him The Gilded Golden.
Goldfang? The Gold Digger?
He’s certainly nowhere near as destructive as Anna, whose exploits were hard to match. But Anna did learn “No,” “Off,” “Come,” and “Stay” fairly quickly. Possibly it’s switching him off between M’hijito’s and my house each day, so he’ll be with a human while M’hijito is at work, that’s at the base of this. We each have different styles, and so it may be hard for him to interpret what two humans are trying to tell him.
I now feel blessed that I have a dog with impeccable house manners. Now why did I want to get another dog? Hmmm….
Seriously, your experience is blowing a huge hole in my thought that it’s best to get another dog before the current one gets too old and ill to act as a “mentor” to the new one. I mean, it sounds like Cassie is well-behaved, so according to my theory that should help Charlie. Dang!
My dog is a ball of anxiety, though, and when she gets really nervous/upset she gets diarrhea, too. The vet told me that it has something to do with the gut flora getting messed up due to extreme anxiety. When this happens she has to go on the bland diet and I usually start feeding her plain yogurt to help restore the gut balance. Luckily it doesn’t happen very often at all.
@ Linda: You might ask the vet for a probiotic. It’s called “Nutrition Now BP8.” It’s acidophilus in a pill form, allowing you to get the beneficial bugs into the dog’s system without having to feed a dairy product, which can disagree with some dogs’ innards. And also see if you can get a canned dog food from Hill’s called Prescription Diet I/U (I think that’s the letters). It’s very plain. Charley’s wobbles went away the instant M’hijito got him on this food, metronidazole, and the PB 8.
Twelve hours have passed, and Charley has not had an attack of diarrhea, so either he’s so plugged up with plastic that nothing will come out or yelling at dogs does little to disturb their equanimity.
As for older dog trains and mentors younger dog…whoa!!! Excruciatingly bad idea.
Greta the German Shepherd was wonder-dog. She was so amazing and so perfect we had exactly the same idea you did: as she got on toward 8 years old or so, we thought we should get a pup so she would somehow model her wonderful self.
That is not how dog society works.
The first GerShep pup we got was so dysplastic that at right about a year, her hindquarters literally fell apart. She could not stand up. We had to have her put to sleep.
During that period, the fine example set by Greta was ignored. Come to think of it, Greta ignored the pup, too.
Then we got Brandy, one of the most spectacularly beautiful Ger-Sheps I’ve ever seen. This dog was guaranteed absolutely positively we swear on our mothers’ graves and our fathers’ Bibles to be sound. Well. Yeah. Hip-wise she was. Mentally, not so much.
At the age of three, Brandy went insane. First she tried to attack me. Then she went after my mother-in-law, who was visiting for a couple of days and made no move toward her or anyone in the house. Then she tried to take down a veterinarian.
Turns out that certain overbred dogs can develop a mental condition in which the animal is not conscious of what it is doing. It can neither be trained not to attack people and animals (because it doesn’t know that’s what it’s doing) nor can it be called off during the attack, because it’s unaware of what’s going on around it. This is the result, we learned, of breeding for aggressiveness. Our vet, who was very experienced with large dogs, advised us to put her down because, he insisted, sooner or later someone was going to get hurt.
Brandy was no more influenced by Greta than the other dog had been. It was as if they lived in bubbles.
Charley is trained by Cassie only in the sense that yes, Cassie DOES train Charley to her purposes. Hers are not the same as the humans. It makes Cassie no nevermind that Charley climbs on the kitchen counter, that he chews the irrigation hoses, that he craves to consume shoes. Her interests have to do with what is in the food bowl and who gets to eat it, what toys are in circulation and who gets to monopolize them, and which chew stick is in the room and what sucker of a puppy so much as dares to go near it.
In Cassie’s context, Charley behaves exceptionally well.
In the humans’ context, he’s still working on it.
A trainer recently suggest using a very loud noisemaker to distract dogs obsessively and unmanageably acting up. Actual item used was a wood or metal spoon in a metal pot, clanged as loudly as you can. Only took twice to stop the problem and they head out of the room if I just reach for the pot now.
Yelling only sounds like loud, loving encouragement to a dog. Use an empty soda can with three pennies in it. Rattling the can produces high-frequency sounds that go right through a dog’s skull. You can also throw the can at the dog without harming either the dog or surrounding infrastructure, achieving discipline at a distance. After the initial shock, it will seem to the dog like Hell’s own minions are chasing after it.
@ Valleycat1 and vinny: Tried that. Doesn’t work.
In the first place, you have to catch the dog in the act to shake the can or bang the pot at him. Obviously, if I’d spotted Charley munching on the sprinklers, I would have stopped him before he disassembled the irrigation system.
Second, it’s been my observation that this strategy does rather little to dissuade a dog (especially THIS dog) from doing whatever you’re trying to convince him to quit doing. Charley ignores it. Throw a can of rattling pennies at Charley and he thinks it’s a game.
Third, I’m not so sure about all the theories re: yelling at dogs. We have no idea what a dog thinks a human is doing when the human is hollering. We have some reason to suspect that dogs can discern certain emotional states, such as aggression, fear, anger, and happiness. It least it appears to us that they do.
In my experience, if you holler at a dog in such a way as to connect the source of the hollering with the hollering itself, dogs DO catch on.
Anna the Ger-Shep quit eating the living-room furniture once and for all (finally!) after I caught her in the act and threw a raving shitfit that went on just about as long as this morning’s rant did. I yelled, I hollered, I cussed, I jumped up and down in rage, I pointed at the furniture and shouted NO NO NO NO NO NO LOOK WHAT YOU DID QUIT THAT YOU GODDAMN DOG and hevvin knows what other antics I got up to. I did not strike the dog or threaten to hit the dog. I just threw a gigantic screaming shitfit.
Something worked. She never ate another piece of furniture again. Ever. Didn’t shit on the carpet after that, either.
Yes, if the yelling is connected to the act in question – they do stop. Five dogs and various attempts and misbehaving later, yes. I just have to AHEM or EH! really loudly the second they look at the sofa and they stop dead in their tracks. Doggle’s got the most limited vocab of them all and even he responds to the yell and the loud noise.
All of my other dogs were way smarter and actually knew what “GIT. AWAY. FROM. THERE.” meant, along with Get your ass to your bed and stay there, or walk out of this room NOW. Etc.
None of mine were hugely destructive, just minorly so, but they definitely racked up the medical bills.
@Linda: The only things my older dogs taught the younger were their bad habits and to help them commit their little doggy crimes.
The little aged one taught the big young galoot to open heavy doors for him to go on late night jaunts. He taught her to fetch paper for them both out of the bin so they could both shred up a storm, he taught her how to chew holes into their bedding every time they got new.
He did NOT teach her anything useful to us at all. Come to think, what the heck did he know that was useful??
P.S. Funny? Don’t feel guilty. That dog is (a little tongue in cheek but still….) lucky to be alive. Dear LORD.
Yeah, it’s pretty clear that if you start hollering when you catch them in flagrante delicto, they do make the connection between the shitfit and the offending act, and they do seem to perceive that the tantrum indicates a high degree of displeasure on the human’s part.
And it appears that with most dogs, a shitfit delivered hours after the crime occurred is most likely incomprehensible.
Although I’ll tell ya…over time German shepherds (most of them) do learn to read and understand almost every one of your behaviors and they very probably can make a connection between a rather stale misdeed and the resulting frenzy. I believe an adult Ger-shep has a human vocabulary of about 500 words, but I’m pretty sure they interpret meaning from many, many other cues.
Other breeds…not so much.
Heh heh heh… Two dogs living in your home do not live in your home. They live in their own world. If yours happens to overlap theirs in some meaningful or useful way, well…that’s nice.