While on location doing research for an upcoming article in Natural Home magazine, I met a couple with a solo, young-ish puppy who is offering up some housetraining challenges. After my initial holy-cow, what-do-you-mean-he’s-still-peeing-in-the-house reaction, I realized that as a solo pup, he has no benefit of generational learning.
In my mind, generational learning is the kind of dog training comes from the other dogs in the household, such as A) housetraining and crate training, but I’m sure there are many others.
Ginko is the last tiny pup we’ve had in the house, and that was 8+ years ago. Before that, it’d been since 1990 when our late Dalmatian (Penelope Grace) came home. As you may recall, Lilly came to us at 6 months old, and I credit her stay in a foster home with her really good housetraining before her arrival here.
So, if you really pressed me, I could probably tell you how I housetrained my dogs, but to be honest, it almost feels like I taught it once way back wtih Penelope, who was my first dog as an adult, but after that, I’ve relied on my current dogs to help teach any new dogs (or pups) the rules.
They learn bad habits too, which is why I’m happy that Lilly never took on Ginko’s love of dirty dishes in the dishwasher and why I’m thinking seriously about reeling in The Barking Queen because I really do NOT want another generation of quite this much noise. Although the patience required boggles the mind.
It’s easy, I think, to get lax and believe, “Well, I’ll fix that next time around,” but I’m pondering the wisdom (and sanity savings) of fixing a few of the things that bug me now. So, the question is this:
Do you/have you trained (or retrained) something now to save yourself the headache for generations to come? If so, what? And, how?
That makes me sad to think about. I’m sorry for your loss. Perhaps down the road, you’ll see his leadership carried on in the actions of your current pals or in the behavior of any new pups in the future. Maybe you’ll have a glimpse of him, and you’ll know it carried through the generations.
When our oldest dog passed away this summer, we lost our best teacher. He was so good at teaching puppy manners and dog skills. I fear for the future of my dog pack if future puppies are going to be learning from L! Yikes!