The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout (5 page)

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Authors: Jill Abramson

BOOK: The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout
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It was on this field of dreams that Scout had her first big mishap. One sweltering afternoon, she took her customary position in far left field. As I pitched and Adam endured a long series of balls, hitless swings, and foul tips, sap from a pine tree dripped all over Scout. When Adam saw what had happened, he cried out, “Scoutie looks like a dalmatian!” She was a terrible, sticky mess, and after dragging her into the house I scoured the Internet for remedies. Once I discovered the recommended treatment, I dabbed the spots of tar with olive oil and peanut butter. By the end of this tedious process, Scout was once again blond, but she smelled like a peanut butter sandwich.
Our house wasn’t far from Long Island Sound,
and during Adam’s visit we often took Scout for walks on the beach. She was wary of the surf, but she liked to splash along the shoreline and let the water rise up to her belly. We were all thrilled when Adam threw a stick and Scout dove in, retrieved the stick, and paddled back to shore. Then she wouldn’t give up the stick, but we nonetheless celebrated the superb display of her retriever roots. Scout and Adam got along famously, and it warmed my heart to watch the two of them—these two beautiful puppies—cavort in the sand and the sea. By the end of Adam’s visit, I was pretty certain that Mariane would be dealing with a major episode of “Can we please get a dog” begging when she and Adam returned to Paris.
 
 
The Monday after Mariane and Adam left, my vacation came to an end. That morning, as I dressed in my office clothes, I felt as if I were assuming another identity, much as I did when I went back to work after maternity leaves. While riding the Metro-North train from New Haven to New York, I began making the transition back to my life at the
Times
by reading the papers and catching up on e-mail.
With the vacation behind me, I plunged back into my job and stayed in the city for two full weeks. This
was my first extended separation from Scout, and it was a little depressing to live a solitary life again. As a new puppy owner, I had made so many new friends, both dog and human, and over the summer I had become much calmer and happier. I missed the morning walks with the Breakfast Club, which felt like a much healthier way to start the day than rushing to my computer. Most of all, I missed Scout. Bill Keller, my boss and the paper’s executive editor, told me that he noticed a sudden rise in the number of dog stories being pitched for the front page. To curb the trend, he urged me to recuse myself from any discussion about a proposed dog story.
Inevitably, I showed off my latest Scout photos to anyone who betrayed even a hint of interest. Over the years, my office had become a Buddy shrine; many of my friends and colleagues had deluged me with every kind of Westie item, from a needlepoint pillow to a white ceramic pen container. Michiko Kakutani, the
Times
’s chief book critic, was particularly generous: not only had she given me dozens of pairs of socks emblazoned with Westies; she had also given me an antique desk lamp with a bronze terrier perched on its base. It was made in the 1940s, when Scottish terriers were the rage because of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s beloved dog, Fala.
Even after Buddy died, people who didn’t know me
especially well kept sending me Westie gifts. Recently, I had tearfully opened a set of Westie coasters and then a white bar of soap in the shape of a Westie. So when I returned to my desk one day and found a package from the columnist Maureen Dowd, I worried that it, too, would contain more Buddy stuff. Instead, the box contained a ceramic plate with a golden retriever puppy painted on it. I displayed Maureen’s gift in a place of honor, and now all the white in my office could begin to turn golden.
 
 
Chewing. It was a constant with Scout. Her needlelike baby teeth were being replaced by permanent, bigger ones and the teething was driving her nuts. At fifteen weeks, she had grown bored with our usual cache of rawhide bones and frozen towel bows and was now wild for shoes, preferably Cornelia’s fanciest ones. We were vigilant, we thought, but Scout managed to chew and flatten beyond recognition a pair of black satin sandals with sassy bows that our daughter had carelessly flung into the gated family room and kitchen area where Scout slept in her crate, ate her food, and happily chewed. But even sequestered and puppy-proofed, the space offered a thousand temptations,
from the cording on the couch upholstery to the wires of our computers. We lived in fear of puppy electrocution.
Partly so we could keep an eye on her, we removed one of the cushions from our couch and encouraged Scout to curl up in the resulting gap. This gave her a cozy place to sit within snuggle distance of us, and it was low enough that she could easily hop on and off. Dogs generally love protected spaces, and the sunken “nest” on the couch quickly became her favorite place to hang out.
One August evening, while we were enjoying a peaceful hour watching
Antiques Roadshow
, Scout climbed down from the couch and went behind it. As we watched the show, we were vaguely aware of what we assumed was the sound of Scout chewing on one of her rawhides, and she was really going at it. Then Henry got up to get a beer and saw, to his horror, that Scout had in fact been chewing on the leg of an old table, which was now completely covered with teeth marks. There was even a scattering of what looked like sawdust around the bottom of the leg.
Clearly drastic action was required, and we began by removing all the nearby wooden chairs and tables. Next we christened the area on top of her crate the Land of No; this became a no-chew zone, and whenever
Scout stole a forbidden object we put it there. The roof of the crate soon resembled a clearance sale at Macy’s, with layers of outlawed goods stacked up high. Meanwhile, Scout manifested her obsession with chewing outdoors as well. Clumps of grass clippings from the lawn mower, pinecones, and even shells at the beach were all grist for her new set of choppers.
I took some solace from the stories told to me by friends who had made it through the puppy chewing frenzy. Phyllis Goverman, my college roommate, told me that “chewing was almost the end for us.” As a young puppy, Lola, her now one-year-old Lab, had shredded Phyllis’s most comfortable chair, eating a large helping of the stuffing in the process. Lola had also savaged the linoleum floor in the kitchen, where Phyllis left her during the hours she was teaching. I also consulted with Anna Quindlen, a former
Times
colleague and friend, who had written a book I loved called
Good Dog. Stay
. Anna comforted me by recalling that her queenly Lab, Bea, was fascinated with paper as a puppy—valuable paper. “She once ate a refund check from the State of New York, and $400 in $20 bills,” Anna reported in an e-mail meant to reassure me.
By late August, Scout was big enough to launch carefully planned raids on the Land of No. This
prompted us to give up her puppy-sized crate and buy one that would suit her when she grew to full size. At four and a half months, she already weighed almost forty pounds and was still gaining weight rapidly. Donna Cutler had estimated that she would ultimately weigh sixty pounds, but by using my powers as a crack investigative reporter, I observed Scout’s huge paws and deduced that Donna’s estimate would almost certainly prove too conservative.
What to feed Scout, when to feed her, and how to begin more serious training to curb her irrepressible puppy habits—like chewing shoes or jumping up on guests—were sources of growing tension between Henry and me. Since her arrival, we had been feeding Scout the same kibble diet that Donna had started her on. But she was constantly hungry and would have happily eaten twice what we fed her. Meanwhile, Henry had instituted a ban on human food except for the yogurt on the kibble. He was determined that Scout not become the fussy eater and beggar that Buddy was, with his taste for grilled chicken or (I confess) salmon, preferably wild Alaskan sockeye. Our stern pack leader was quick to point out that Buddy had become so spoiled by this richer diet that he utterly spurned unadorned kibble, and it was true.
Henry had been overjoyed to note that during her earliest weeks with us, Scout had been indifferent to
our family gatherings at the table, which I attributed to the new, stricter food rules. But one night she began barking excitedly while Henry was eating a bowl of strawberries with whipped cream. Funny, we thought, strawberries don’t usually appeal to dogs. Then, as I was scattering cheese on top of a pan of lasagna, Scout went nuts as I shoved the pan into the oven. That night we put two and two together: these white toppings on our food looked like her yogurt.
The fatal connection—between our food and her always-hungry stomach—had been made. And once it was, she was always by our side at the table, pleading at us with those irresistible brown eyes and batting those big lashes. Soon she began barking at us while we were eating. When she wouldn’t stop, we had to enforce time-outs and shut her in our laundry room while we downed a meal and listened, all of us miserable, to her pathetic whimpering.
In desperation, I called Jane Mayer, who had trained three Labrador retrievers, including Peaches, yellow and regal, for whom we occasionally dog-sat. Peaches was mellow about everything but food. Once, when I was in the kitchen baking a cake, a stick of butter was softening on the counter. In the instant I turned around to get the eggs out of the fridge, the butter was gone. Peaches had only a slightly guilty expression on her face.
“Food can be your friend,” Jane told me. “It is a great reward. She wants to please you, and a treat will help you reinforce her good behavior. Stop focusing so much on what displeases you.” Since working together on our book about Clarence Thomas, we often turned to each other for advice when we were covering tough stories or experiencing difficulties in our careers. “Jill, you handled Howell Raines,” Jane reminded me, referring to a former
Times
executive editor with whom I had often clashed. “You can handle a puppy.”
Henry’s strict approach to feeding Scout began to bend when Marian Spiro, whom we considered the ultimate dog authority, agreed with Jane that puppy treats were useful for marking Scout’s good behavior. “Use them when you are practicing basic commands like Sit, Stay, and Come,” she urged us. Cyon’s favorite, Marian told me during a walk at the farm, was Pup-Peroni, especially the “original bacon recipe.” (It comes in a bright red package, and thanks to the pet food industry’s slick marketing it looks pretty delicious.) When Marian offered my ravenous pup a little taste of the soft beefy treat, Scout’s face reminded me of Cornelia’s thrilled expression as a toddler when, against my better judgment, I let her have some Cheetos. From then on, whenever Scout saw us drop the red package of Pup-Peroni onto our kitchen counter after
one of our regular shopping sprees at Petco, she recognized it immediately and practically toppled over in ecstasy.
 
 
As summer drew to a close, a deadline loomed: by Labor Day we had to finish preparing Scout for her introduction to Manhattan. I couldn’t wait for her to join me in the city. After my two-week vacation in August, during which I had bonded much more intensely to Scout, I found the weekdays without her almost intolerable.
I knew the transition from Connecticut to New York wouldn’t be seamless. For one thing, we couldn’t assume that months of housebreaking in the country would carry over. Still, it had been many weeks since Scout had had an accident inside our house, so we were fairly confident that she would quickly learn to wait for an elevator before getting outside our building, though it might prove harder for her to become used to relieving herself on communal pavement instead of the grass on our lawn.
Before she became a part-time city dog, Scout needed to learn how to walk on a leash, and we had already begun practicing. As we moved along our street in Connecticut one day, I thought things were
going pretty well until I felt a tug, looked behind me, and saw Scout on her back, her adorable belly exposed, snapping at the leash like a turtle. For her, the leash was simply another object begging for a good chew. More troubling, Scout invariably lunged if a squirrel or chipmunk crossed the road near us. I worried about how she would do crossing the busy, traffic-choked streets of Tribeca.
Sometimes we practiced walking her on a leash at the farm. After one long session during which Henry walked Scout while wearing wet, ill-fitting shoes, he developed painful tendonitis. Now, at least for the time being, I became Scout’s sole leash instructor and my left leg—the one with the titanium rod in it—began to ache. Not surprisingly, our temporarily crippled state led me to have some nagging second thoughts about the wisdom of getting such a large puppy who needed so much exercise. The monks, wise though they are, had provided no advice in their books for our situation. There is no Official Puppy Handbook for fifty-somethings.
Despite our infirmities, we couldn’t ignore our 6 a.m. alarm clock, which was the sound of Scout braying to be freed from her crate. Sore and cranky though we were, the sight of her jumping excitedly on her hind legs to greet us each morning brought instant
joy. Her favorite game was grabbing a toy in her teeth and prompting me to chase her outside and onto the lawn to play tug-of-war, often in my pajamas. (A new puppy, I quickly came to realize, gave me an unassailable license to be ridiculous in public.) During our morning play, she sometimes forgot about the growing strength of her jaws and drew blood on my hands and forearms.
Right before the summer ended, I had to travel to the
Times
’s Washington bureau for a two-day business trip. I was worried about leaving Henry, who was still disabled, alone with Scout. I also knew I would miss her terribly. But work called, and so off I went.
That evening, when I called Henry to check on how things were going, he delivered an upsetting report. One of his clients was a nonprofit group in Connecticut, and he was racing to complete a proposal for the group in the next week or so. He was so consumed by Scout care that he was already tense about meeting the deadline; then, on top of that, he had made a truly awful discovery. Scout had chewed the frames and broken the lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses, which had slipped out of his pocket and onto the couch. “This is really more than I was prepared to handle,” he moaned. Luckily, his optician was able to make a replacement pair and ship the glasses to him overnight. In the
meantime, he was wearing prescription sunglasses at his desk in order to get some writing done.
I felt horribly guilty because I was out of town and unable to help. But I also had a deeper concern: Scout’s puppy destructiveness seemed to be reaching unacceptable levels. It was time to get professional help.
 
 
What happened next was a loopy canine version of O. Henry’s famous short story “The Gift of the Magi.” On the same day and without telling each other, Henry and I both put in a distress call to the same dog trainer.
I liked Diane Abbott the minute I heard her voice. For every tale of woe I recounted, her reaction was an amused giggle. Diane offered a puppy kindergarten class in a nearby Connecticut town, and in his initial conversation with Diane, Henry had been so favorably impressed that he had booked a home consultation with her for the next Saturday.
I had watched enough Cesar Millan to know that owners, almost always more than their dogs, are the ones who need training. So in the days leading up to our meeting with Diane, I made a list of all the questions and anxieties about Scout that I wanted to discuss with her.
By then, Henry and I agreed that we had to train Scout more rigorously than we had trained Buddy. It embarrassed me to remember that Buddy had flunked out of dog-training class, in large part because we were not consistent in practicing with him. We had also waited too long: we hadn’t signed him up for classes until he was three years old. Diane told us that she liked to begin training with pups as young as three months.
On the morning of Diane’s visit, Scout and I waited near our driveway. The woman who emerged from a tan hatchback had blond hair and looked like an athlete; reaching into her backseat, she pulled out a heavy, overstuffed bag and lugged it over to us. Scout immediately focused on the bag, practically jumping inside. Diane giggled, just as she had on the phone, which put me at ease. “She smells all my goodies,” Diane said. Scout happily followed Diane inside.
Diane spent most of the next two hours talking to Henry and me. Scout watched us attentively and was occasionally called upon for a demonstration. During that first consultation, we learned several invaluable lessons.
Diane was particularly insightful about the importance of positive reinforcement. Every time Scout did something we didn’t like, we had been using stern voices and telling her “No.” Instead, Diane said, we should focus less on correcting her negative behavior and more on rewarding her positive behavior. “Concentrate on what we want,” Diane told us. “Don’t give attention to what we don’t like.”
Scout gets her first lesson from Diane Abbott

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