by Melissa Bowersock
Who here has had a puppy? Raise your hand if you have. (I feel a sea of hands!) And who here has gone through all the challenges of training a puppy to be socially acceptable? Yeah, I figured. I often feel sorry for puppies because it seems like all they hear is “NO!”, “Don’t do that!”, “Get away from there!”, “Give me that!” As you can imagine, Lily is no different.
When we got Lily, our first soft-coated Wheaten terrier (after 30 years with Airedales), I joined a Wheaten Facebook group to see what lessons I could glean from the group. At one point I asked the group, “How did you get your Wheaten to quit jumping on people?”
The responses I got were funny…and disturbing. I heard “That’s just what they do.” Or “Mine is 10 years old and still does that.” Another: “It’s a Wheaten; live with it.” Apparently it IS a Wheaten thing, and a lifelong thing unless stern training is applied. However, I’ve also heard (and seen) that Wheatens are very sensitive; a raised voice or a cross word can send Lily cowering in a corner. I’ve been warned to not be too harsh or break her spirit. So where’s the middle ground?
The good news is, we must be doing something right because Lily is progressing. She absolutely loves to go hiking and gets excited when we put her harness on and walk to the car instead of straight out to the street for a neighborhood amble.
We’ve been using the stand-on-the-leash trick pretty consistently, and by now she understands that she may NOT jump on people. Matter of fact, just this morning we encountered two couples on our hike, and both times Lily sat very quietly and politely and just wagged her tail and squirmed and smiled.
Of course, if people get within jumping distance, she will still try to close that gap, but we tell them we’re in training, and they usually keep a safe distance. I get the pup’s desire to be close. Lily loves everyone and wants to get as close as she can, and of course at only 30 pounds, she’s shorter than every human we meet, so in order to really smooch them, she must jump UP. Yeah, this is going to be a long-term challenge.
The second challenge is…digging. Most terrier owners know the history and description of the breed, and the fact that they were bred to go to ground.
Terriers have been used to go after mice, rats, gophers, badgers, foxes, and even bears in the case of Airedales. They are natural diggers and on top of that are determined and stubborn. The combination of those traits means a terrier has never met a plot of dirt too hard to dig into. Lily proves that almost daily, coming in from outside with her nose red from the red Utah dirt.
So in this circumstance, we have good news and bad news. After Lily dug from our yard to our neighbor’s yard—twice—to play with their dog, we spent a month laying a 2-foot swathe of wire fencing on the ground along the property line, and we then covered that with black landscape fabric and river rock a couple inches deep. Problem solved; no more digging out of the yard. So what did she do instead? She dug up our septic tank—twice. Apparently anything worth doing is worth doing twice.
Now, when we bought this house, the inspector said in his report that he could not find the septic tank, so obviously he did not inspect it. Hmm. Okay, well, the system is working fine so we didn’t worry about it. In that respect, Lily did us a favor: she found the tank. All well and good. But the reason she dug it up was, we realized, because there was a small hole in the cap.
Obviously, with her nose, she could smell the aromatic scent and just followed it down to the source. So good news is we have a tank; bad news is it has a hole in it. We called a plumber, and he came out to look at it, then told us a replacement cap was not necessary and we could patch the small hole with rubber calk. More good news. We did that, reburied the tank with a liberal sprinkling of cayenne pepper mixed in with the dirt, and now have a pile of rocks marking the location and, hopefully, protecting it from future excavations. Only time will tell.
Puppies are hard work; terrier puppies even more so. But as most of you know, they are worth all the headaches, the setbacks, the destruction, and the mess. Lily is a handful at 9 months; she’s getting better, but still has her off days. But you know what? Having her gaze at us with those loving, trusting puppy eyes is worth every bit of repair and work she causes.
