Several months ago, I walked into our Cesar Millan, Inc., offices and noticed our staff crowded around one computer screen, making “ooh” and “aah” noises. I nudged my way in to see what all the fuss was about. There in front of me, in a slightly blurry video, was a litter of six adorable Shiba Inu puppies—three male and three female—in a padded dog bed, playfully crawling over one another. When I learned that this was actually a live video feed in real time, I was fascinated—and impressed. Apparently the breeders—a San Francisco couple—had set up a video camera to serve as a kind of “baby monitor” so they could keep an eye on their charges at all times. The employees at the Internet company that set up the live feed fell in love with the puppies and began sending links to other friends. The link went “viral,” and suddenly millions of people in more than forty countries were glued to their computer screens, watching the homegrown phenomenon that became known as the puppycam. During a time of national economic stress, viewers claimed that watching the Shiba Inu puppies calmed them down, distracted them from their worries, and had an overall positive effect on their mental health.
The puppycam experience inspired several of our Dog Whisperer staff members to set up their own webcams to start monitoring their dogs and puppies at home. Once the Shiba Inu puppies had grown up and moved on, there was always some new puppy adventure unfolding on one of our office computers.
Whatever your cultural background, the language you speak, your race, creed, or religion, you’d have to be made of stone not to be moved by the antics of puppies. Their apparent helplessness and adorable, clumsy attempts to explore a world that is new to them automatically awakens the nurturing instincts that nature has implanted deep in the genes of every male and female, child and grandparent. And as the testimonials from puppycam fans prove, loving puppies is good for us! Puppies bring us closer to our innocent, natural animal selves. They relieve our stress, improve our health, and remind us that true happiness exists only in the moment. Loving and raising a puppy can be one of the richest, most rewarding experiences of a person’s entire life. And once that puppy becomes a full-grown dog, the bond created during those first eight months—the stage that I call puppyhood—can solidify into the kind of relationship that will sustain you throughout your dog’s lifetime and beyond.
However, the fact that our human hearts routinely melt into butter whenever we see a pup doesn’t automatically make us qualified to raise one. That’s why I’m writing this book.
What is it about dogs that makes us believe the skills for raising them will come as effortlessly to us as raising our own human offspring? I don’t know many humans who believe they would automatically know how to raise a baby elephant, leopard, or dolphin, should one happen to fall into their laps! I’m sure most people instinctively know that you don’t raise a seal cub, a parrot chick, or a foal the same way you would a human child. Human beings have even learned hard lessons about trying to raise our closest cousins, the higher primates, as if they were hairier versions of ourselves. I recently read a heartbreaking book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, by Elizabeth Hess, about a 1970s-era experiment designed to teach a chimpanzee language in a social context, by taking him from his mother in infancy and rearing him as if he were a human boy, in the midst of an upscale Manhattan family. Though Nim did manage to learn excellent skills in American Sign Language and could communicate with it for the rest of his life, his animal nature soon overwhelmed the human members of his naive adoptive family, who were forced to abandon him. He lived out the rest of his sad life in a kind of no-man’s-land of foster homes and primate research facilities, never knowing if he was chimp, human, or something in between.
One of my cardinal rules in life is that we must respect animals as the beings they are, rather than as the near-human companions we might wish them to be. To me, having a true bond with an animal means celebrating and honoring its animal nature first, before we start to co-opt it into being our friend, soul mate, or child.
Although puppies may seem like wordless human babies to us, the truth is, puppies are dogs first. Raising a puppy to be a healthy, balanced dog is a very different process from successfully nurturing a baby to be a happy, confident young adult. As much as we may want them to be, puppies are not the dog equivalent of babies, especially by the time we usually take over as their caregivers. Whereas babies are essentially helpless creatures for many months, puppies come into this world as little survival machines, revealing their true animal natures almost immediately after they are born. A three-day-old puppy will already be striving to assert its dominance over its siblings by pushing them away from the mother’s nipple. By two to three weeks, that same puppy will be able to walk on its own and will work further to establish its place in the pack. By the time a reputable breeder feels the pup is ready to separate from its mother and littermates—at approximately two months of age—that puppy is already developmentally years ahead of a human baby at the same age. When we adopt a two-month-old puppy, it is far from helpless, although we often continue to view it that way, and treat it accordingly. In doing so, many dog owners unknowingly disregard or disrespect a puppy’s true nature: its “dogness.”
By pampering our growing dogs as if they were helpless babies—carrying them like purses, indulging their every whim, allowing them the kinds of liberties we would never allow a growing child—we thwart their progress from the very start. We can unwittingly nurture fear, anxiety, aggression, or dominance. We can condemn our dogs to lives of instability and stress. By putting our own psychological fulfillment before the very real developmental needs of a growing dog, we may inadvertently create more behavioral issues.
In my experience, it’s usually just lack of knowledge that drives well-meaning dog lovers to make these crucial mistakes. Every dog owner I’ve ever met has genuinely wanted only the best for his or her pet. In this book, I hope to offer some strategies to help owners learn to maintain the true canine identity of a dog before they make it into their “baby.”
One of the most important things to remember about puppyhood is that it is the shortest stage of a healthy dog’s life. A dog is a puppy from birth to eight months, then an adolescent from eight months to three years. With good nutrition and veterinary care, a modern dog’s life span can last from ten to twelve to sixteen years or more.1 I see far too many humans falling in love with a tiny puppy’s cuteness but eventually losing interest in—or, worse, coming to resent—the full-grown dog it is destined to become. This truly breaks my heart. I believe that when we bring a dog into our lives at any age, we take on a very important responsibility for that dog’s lifelong well-being. Owning a dog should be a joyful experience, not a stressful one. Sure, it takes focus and commitment in the early stages, but putting in that hard work up front will pay off in countless ways for years and years to come. The dogs in our lives teach us how to revel in the moment, not obsess over our pasts or our futures. Dogs show us that simple joys—rolling around on the floor, running through the park, splashing in the pool, stretching out on the grass under a warming sun—are still the very best life has to offer. And dogs help us experience a deeper kind of connection—not just with animals but with the other humans in our lives and with ourselves.
If you are certain you want to commit to a dog for life, you truly have an incredible opportunity in front of you. This is truly your chance to create and mold the dog of your family’s dreams, as well as nurture another living being into fulfilling all that nature destined it to become. Pups are programmed by their DNA to absorb the rules, boundaries, and limitations of the societies they live in. If you clearly communicate your family’s rules to the puppy from day one, you can mold a companion that will respect, trust, and bond with you on a level that you never imagined possible. But, like children, dogs are constantly observing, exploring, and working to figure out how they fit into the world around them. If you consistently send them the wrong signals in the early days of your relationship, it will be a lot more difficult to rehabilitate them once those bad habits are ingrained.
I’ve raised hundreds of dogs in my life, through many different developmental stages, but when I decided to write this book, I wanted to make sure I was actually going through the process of following several puppies from birth into young adulthood. Every dog I rehabilitate or adopt, every puppy I raise, helps me better understand the nature of dogs and how we humans can give them the best, most balanced life possible. I hope the individual journeys of the dogs that appear in this book will help bring down to earth some of the concepts we’ll be discussing.
Can you really raise “the perfect dog”? I absolutely believe you can. That’s because I believe nature places the formula for perfection deep within every organism it creates. As human beings, we like to think we can improve upon nature, and perhaps in some areas we can. But when it comes to raising dogs, nature had it right the first time. Let’s stop reinventing the wheel and start learning from life’s best teachers, the dogs themselves.