…is something people with children don’t usually agree with.
Of course puppies and babies are not the same and to compare the difficulty of raising a dog to a human being is really unfair.
That said, raising a puppy is A LOT like what I ASSUME raising a baby is like.
Everyone knows the positive things about raising a puppy – they are stupid adorable, cuddly, wonderful little fluffs of love. You get to teach them tricks and play with them and get that “unconditional love” you’ve heard so much about. It’s wonderful. But there are a lot of not-so-wonderful aspects as well, and those are what I am going to share with you today:
What Sucks About Raising a Puppy
Crate training. Crate training sucks. Dog trainers insist in articles and YouTube videos that dogs LOVE their crates. It’s their COMFORT ZONE HOMEY HOME.
Yeah, right.
Crate training Ranger was a true nightmare. He hated the crate. He would throw his tiny little puppy body against the bars, making ungodly sounds. We wrote a note and taped it to our front door that said, “Sorry for the noise. We are crate training our new puppy. We love him very much we are not torturing him.”
I’m not even kidding. We did that.
It took weeks.
We’d lay in bed listening to his screams and whining, forcing ourselves not to get up and let him out. It was horrible. And yet all the dog experts swore we were doing the right thing.
Eventually, though, it worked. He was crate trained. And while he still to this day gives us a death stare when it’s time for bed, he does go in willingly and waits quietly to be let out. See:
Luckily Grizzly wasn’t nearly as hard to crate train. I’m sure having Ranger as an example helped immensely.
I’ll write in more detail about crate training later, just needed to mention here how horrible it was.
Housebreaking. Can’t have the puppy peeing in the house, or in the crate, so you have to be cognizant of time and rush him outside every few hours. This includes the middle of the night – we would take turns setting the alarm and getting up at 1am, 4am, etc. to take him outside. Ranger was actually a dream to potty train – it only took a few days. He won’t even go to the bathroom in our campsite – we have to walk him away from it before he will go because he understands the area as a “living space” and you don’t pee where you sleep. He’s amazing.
Grizzly on the other hand…took a lot longer. He had a lot of accidents and just didn’t seem to understand that he was supposed to pee outside. On more than one occasion I would look down to see him staring up at me sweetly, then start peeing on the floor without breaking eye contact with me.
Missing your partner. Due to the focus on the new puppy you end up not seeing much of your partner those first few weeks. You crave just a few quiet hours alone without the puppy around.
Walking around in public. This was much worse with Ranger than it was with Grizzly. When Ranger was a puppy we lived in Capitol Hill and I walked just about everywhere, including work and back, with Ranger. If he got tired or hot or just uncomfortable with leaving one of his “safe areas” – namely my office and apartment – he would refuse to walk. He would lay flat as a rug in the middle of the sidewalk and not budge. It was cute and funny at first, then it was infuriating. It took me forever to get anywhere and he wouldn’t listen. To add to that frustration people would stop to pet him and tell him how cute he is – rewarding the behavior I was trying to stop. I received many dirty looks when I had to tell people not to pet him.
Your life now revolves around the dog. You thought getting a dog would add to your life, not become it? You poor fool. That dog is your world now. Your every waking moment is spent wondering if he’s too hot or too cold or hungry or has to pee or hasn’t pooped enough or pooped too much and is that a limp – we need to rush him to the vet! I’m not exaggerating.
Key Difference
There is one key difference between raising a puppy and raising a baby – the stress of training a new puppy only lasts a month or so. That baby is going to keep you on your toes for years. Eighteen of them!
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