Before Buffy came home her first day, I had what I thought was a foolproof plan. In the three weeks between deciding to buy Buffy and taking her home, I inhaled almost four different training manuals and puppy guides, all of which regularly contradicted each other. But they did all seem to agree that paper training wasn’t the first step in housetraining. If you HAD to paper train for the first couple of weeks because of immunity issues, then the outdoor house training process was going to be harder.
Ah hah! I said (because I’m so cool I say “Ah hah!” when in the middle of reading a book). I have a foolproof plan! Our tiny balcony isn’t really suitable for Buffy to hang out in because it would be so easy for her to fall off, but I’ll construct a tiny blocked off area and put a cat’s litter box there filled with soil! That way she can go out into the open(ish) air, learn to pee on soil, and make things really easy for me to clean up!
So there I was, two minutes inside the door, with a puppy who’d behaved perfectly on the train ride and cab ride home going completely mental in my living room, a litterbox filled with bagged soil, and a bemused and slightly terrified flatmate (he had, afterall, agreed to be in charge of Buffy during the afternoons everyday while I was at work) looking on. When she (inevitably, as I wasn’t with it enough to realize she was going to need to pee the SECOND she got in the door after a 2 hour trip from the breeder) popped a squat and began to let loose, I jerked open the balcony door, sat her down on the soil, and beemed at her expectantly. At which point, she beatifically stood up an wandered back into the living room to the exact same spot and continued her business.
Doh! said I.
You see, though I had blocked off the three garden-facing sides of this puppy porta john, I had failed to take into account the (now obvious) possibility that she might not actually want to simply stay in a 1 foot by six inch rectangular patch of soil. In fact, she would much rather be inside with me.
So, after about 5 minutes of an ineffective method I like to call sitting in the doorjam and trying to grab her every time she tried to vault over my legs, I abandoned my ingenious soil-box plan.
Now she’s paper-trained.
Sort of.
I’ll let you know how that whole outdoor training thing goes.
Posted by Karen 
