Top Five

Top Five Reasons

that it’s hard raising a puppy in an apartment

5) The obvious… We don’t have any back yard. To be fair some flats do have gardens, and in fact ours does have a communal garden. Which is blocked off by a massive metal gate. And several locks. We do have a little balcony, and if you’ve read the post about my first plans to potty train you know that I was planning on having Buffy pee in a litter box filled with soil on the balcony. But this turned out to be quite the idiotic idea, and since the balcony sides have holes in them that Buffy could easily jump through and really hurt herself, that’s a no for the balcony. So far there’s not been any outdoor space where Buffy’s been off the leash, because there’s nothing that we could secure or that’s ours.

4) The carpets… I suppose luckily, we don’t rent, which means that all the carpet pee so far has no bearing on security deposits or any such. Of course the carpet was already pretty stained and we’re already planning to put in bamboo flooring (cuz it’s AWESOME. cheaper than wood and offers license to pat yourself on the back for being environmentally friendly in your conspicuous consumption…), so I don’t have to feel too bad about that…but yeah, if we weren’t in a small London apartment I’d hope there would be at least some space we could use that was uncarpeted, so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the trouble.

3) The distractions…. Getting Buffy to pee outside was a challenge. Getting her to continue to pee outside is also a challenge. Because regularly, mid sniff, she’s distracted by a bus going past on the road, or a motorcycle gunning the engine, or a gaggle of school girls or a stroller or a anything, she can be a distracted by a leaf for goodness sake – but adding in all the distractions of a semi-main road plus a bus stop outside the house, and you get a very distractable pee-er.

2) Giving up ain’t hard to do… When Buffy is whining or barking incessently in her crate, there’s little I would rather do than let her out and make her stop. But I’m very careful…every day, every minute that I’m home…that I NEVER let her out of her crate when she’s whining. My parents’ dog whines from the second you put him in to the second you let him out…unless, that is, you leave the house, in which case he stops immediately. Because he’s learned that if he just whines long enough, if someone’s there to hear him, he’ll get let out. Buffy, I said to myself the very first time she whined, Buffy is definitely not going to be like that. She will love her crate, and she will know from day one that she can’t whine to get her way. Well she may not be perfect, but she’s pretty good…which doesn’t mean she doesn’t still whine! She wants to be the center of attention, or at least hang out near to it, and when she goes into her crate she sometimes likes to make it known to us that she’s not very happy. But I resist. Because I’m supposed to. But boy do I NOT need another motivation TO let her out! And since I live in an apartment, everytime she starts to make a real racket, the first thing I think is…SHH! THE NEIGHBORS! I live in fear that one of my neighbors will complain to – well I’m not sure who you even complain to about these things, horrible evil public-private management company I guess, but SOMEone – and then they’ll make me give Buffy away. So all that guilt and worry just adds motivation to my desire to let her out of her crate RIGHT AWAY…and makes it harder with every whine to do what I know I need to and ignore.

1) The shame! Because she’s not quite fully trained yet, she’s still peeing right in front of the apartment, in a little driveway/circle drive type thing. You’d've thought that pee, being yellow, would be invisible on black pavement…but you’d be wrong! When it’s not raining, Buffy’s humble little pee marks, signs of such accomplishment for us, dot the drive. And since it’s on the tiniest bit of an incline (I’d never noticed before this), those pee stains are generally long, running streams of urine making their way from one side of the drive to the other. Luckily they’re not yellow, but just a darker black. What? I feel like saying, everytime I see a neighbor, They’re obviously oil stains! From…the…15 or so cars….that have parked here…in this tiny drive…where cars aren’t allowed…in the last week…(and of course there’s the embarassment when they walk by and I’m in my pajamas and a coat, standing with a plastic bag in one hand and her leash in the other, saying ‘Eliminate! Eliminate!’ over and over to my poor incomprehending puppy…)

She PEED!!!!!

Never have I been so happy about urination before.

We’ve been taking Buffy on walks since last saturday. At first, as I’ve written, she was terrified, but she’s progressed quickly to being eager but timid (the world is a scary place for a tiny puppy, especially when you live in Hackney). But no matter how long we stay out, or where we go – we could not get her to go to the bathroom outside.

We have a nice code word*, which we’ve tried to train her to while she’s been peeing indoors. Picture this – she gets up in the morning and goes straight into her peepen (a 2′x1′ open-topped cage with a hard plastic floor covered with peepads and newspaper) and we stand outside it saying “Eliminate! Eliminate!” until she pees or poos, and then we tell her what a good girl she is and let her out.

The whole point of this hilarious exercise was so that when we took her outside and said ‘Eliminate!’, she’d have some clue as to what we wanted her to do.

Nope. Not a clue at all.

We tried taking her to the park and saying eliminate until we were blue in the face. We tried running her around until she was so pooped, she pooped. (see what I did there??) We tried taking her to spots where other dogs had just peed. We tried bringing used peepads and newspapers out with us, we tried bringing toys out with us, we distracted her with running, and treats, and everything we could think of. She had absolutely no idea what we wanted.

So last night, I decided, it was happening. The puppy was peeing outside…and we weren’t going in until she did. So I brought the cage part of her pee pen outside, all four disconnected (and heavy!) pieces, and arranged it into a cage on the driveway in front of our apartment building, and put her inside with a peed on peepad and some newspaper. Girlfriend and I stood there for a minute or two, and then our flatmates noticed what was going on and they came out too. So all four of us were standing there, staring down at Buffy, going “Eliminate! Eliminate!”

Still, Buffy remained utterly clueless as to why we would do such a thing. So we tried every word we could think of for urination, though obviously they meant nothing to her. We tried making psssss-ing sounds. We tried talking about waterfalls, and creating our own dripping water sounds. One flatmate even got down on the ground in a puppy-peeing position in an attempt to inspire by example! I drew the line at actual example though.

Passers-by, buses on the street, and our neighbors all found this hilarious I’m sure. So did we – we even took a picture, which I’ll add to this post later. But eventually the hilarity wore off, and we began to think logistics. If it really did take hours for her to get the idea, we were going to need to take shifts. So slowly everyone peeled off, first the flatmates then the Girlfriend, until it was just me and Buffy in the dark (well, in the light from the street lamps).

And then, she peed.

It was the most exciting thing to happen to me in ages.

I made such a fuss my flatmates heard through their open window, and everyone came out to congratulate her. The victory! The satisfaction! In we all went, and pee pen too, and felt that a corner had been rounded, a new age dawned, a new leaf turned.

Of course when I tried again 2 hours later, I stayed out for almost an hour and utterly failed.

But hey, one success per day, right??

*There was much discussion about this, when we first decided to get Buffy. We could use any word or phrase as her code word. Top choice was “Release the Clowns!” Also in the running: Swedish for ‘take a shit’, ‘fire’, ‘slay’ (because Girlfriend wanted to shout that in the park to our tiny adorable puppy). However, on the first day Buffy arrived, I was in such a panic, I completely forgot all the words and phrases we’d discussed and all I could think of was ‘eliminate!’ So in an effort not to confuse her, I stuck with that, despite the fact that I look like a ridiculous idiot and sound like a Dalek.