As I’ve written, I’m wary of taking advice or giving it, but training dogs is a little different.

I don’t tell other people what to do, but I do share my own experiences. People can take what they wish and leave the rest behind.

I’ve been successful in most of my dig training, especially in recent years. I’ve made a lot of stupid and horrendous mistakes. I think I learned the most from them.

This is more a function of age and experience than anything else, I think, but training a puppy is important, it sets the tone for our life with our dogs, it shows them how to live safely in an alien world, it is the difference between a wonderful dog experience and a nightmare.

So I’m happy to share what I’m doing. I hope it is helpful.

I’ll write in short bursts so as not to overwhelm me or you.

First comes the mindset. We cannot offer our dogs perfect lives without struggle or pain any more than we can do that for ourselves.

The definition of a good dog is a dog that gives up the natural wants and desires of a dog – freedom, sex, the right to eat what they want, the right to chew on sofas, dig up bulbs, fight with each other, walk freely, roll in feces, (eat some) even have sex, go outside when they choose, run in the woods.

When a puppy leaves home, it is disruptive, confusing and painful. At first, they won’t like it, they will be  homesick just like our children when they leave home. One woman told me whenever her puppy cried in his crate, she felt badly for him and brought him into bed. This was her advice to me when I got Zinnia.

She concedes that years later, she had a needy, untrained, and often obnoxious dog who clung to her morning noon and night, peed on the carpets, and still slept in bed even though he weighed 50 lbs.

People who think their dots are a version of children will soon learn otherwise, and the dog will suffer for it. Zinnia is an animal, and I never forget that in our training.

Some battles you just have to win. Zinnia sleeps peaceably through the night, her real issue is loneliness. She misses her litter mates, constant playmates always available to her as well as her mother.

This will take her a week or so to work though. I believe this is one of those template training issues that the human simply must win, as hard as it is to hear a puppy yelp and whine, which Zinnia does during the day, never at night. She misses her buddies I think.

But she is also learning that making noise fails every time, being silent always succeeds.

Today we let her outside in the yard with Bud for the first time, the two romped, chased one another, played tug of war. She’s exhausted and sleeping in a crate in my study for the first time right now.

Maria and I are winning this fight, and the rest of our lives together will be better for it.

In coming weeks I’m going to write about an important discovery of mine when I was training Bud.

It’s called the Pet Corrector spray for dogs, and it sells on Amazon and many pet stores for $15.95. It is an aerosol air spray that has no chemicals of any kind, but makes a sharp hissing sound that dogs hate.

Today, Zinnia started jumping up on my leg. I kicked her off, and then when she did it again, I took out the Pet Corrector and held it away from her and pressed the button. She jumped back and did not jump on my leg again. As I sprayed I said “off” in a loud and sharp voice. I am ever mindful that while Zinnia is a 13 lb. dog now, she will be a 60 or 70 lb. dog in a year.

As I want her to do therapy work, it is essential that she not jump up on people, she could injure, even kill an extreme elderly person by knocking them off balance or making them fall.

Pet Corrector is also good for training puppies to choose their own things to gnaw on and eat, not mine. Many Lab owners tell me “you just wait until she chews up  your house.”

I’ve had a bunch of Labs, I’ve never had one who chewed up my house. You know why? Because I don’t permit it to happen. They have plenty of things to chew, and for the first months of their lives they are either in crates or are closely supervised. When I catch them eating my stuff, I spray into the air.

They stop.

I am disciplined about crates during the first weeks and months of a puppies life. If they get too excited in the house, into the crate. If they chew in pillows or shoes, I use the Pet Corrector or just hiss at them. That works too.

I believe I must always retain my dignity when training dogs, as well as protecting theirs. I won’t be abused any more than I will abuse them.

People tell me all the time that they can’t bear to see their dogs, especially their puppies unhappy, even for a second. This is the closest guarantee to chaos that there is with a dog. It is far from loving or humane.

The leading cause of death for American dogs is euthanasia,  caused when dogs that are no longer adoptable are returned to shelters. People say this is because the dog just  proved too much for them, but I believe the more truthful reason is that they didn’t bother to think through their training or commit to seeing it through.

As a steward of my dogs, my job is to help them live safely in a world that deprives them of almost every natural tendency that they have. To live well with us, they have to give up a lot, not us. My job is show them with clarity and affection how to do this, so that they will not spend their lives being yelled at or confined to yards and basements, or worse, given up to a very uncertain fate.

That is not love, neither is keeping them in crates in no-kill shelters for the rest of their lives. If my neighbor did that, I would call it the cruelest kind of abuse.

Zinnia is on target to be the sixth dog of mine in a row that was housebroken in two or three days. Housebreaking is the simplest thing in the world to teach a dog, who naturally prefer to eliminate outdoors, around familiar smells.

The trick is to give them no opportunity to fail.

You just have to be disciplined for a few days.  For those first days, they are in the crate or outside. When they go outside, as they inevitably will after eating, they can be praised or given treats.

That’s about it. Cesar Milan devotes 35 pages in his perfect dog book to housebreaking a dog.  It makes me dizzy, nobody can remember his 50 steps. It just isn’t that complicated.

I first learned this from farmers, who housebreak dogs by leaving them in barns for a couple of days. “The trick,” one told me,” is to keep them out of the house until they learn to go elsewhere.”

I’ve never met a farmer with a dog that isn’t housebroken, and I’ve never met a farmer who would spend $21.36 to buy Cesar Milan’s book “How To Raise the Perfect Dog: From Puppyhood And Beyond.” I think a lot of Cesar Milan, but most of us don’t have a dozen assistants screening the dogs we save and train.

I want to conclude this reverie by pointing out once again that every person, environment and dog is different. There is no one way to do anything in the dog world, from getting a dog to training a dog.

I am learning to trust myself and my instincts, nobody knows me, my wife, my farm, my shortcomings and strengths- and above all, my dog – better than I do.

The arrogance of the dog world holds that what works for us must work for everybody. That is a lot of horseshit in my experience. I don’t like or listen to anybody who tells me what to do.

What works best for me is thinking, planning, common sense and discipline. What works is our own judgement and commitment, not mine or anybody else’s.

I am no Cesar Milan, I just want to be my own guru. That’s the best advice I can give. It’s working for me, and for Zinnia too. She’s a very happy dog, and I do not  begrudge her some whining. I do it a lot myself.