Puppy to adult, one case

For years I did not take puppy cases. The cases that came to me were the hard ones, the dog who had bitten twice, the dog who tore the flat apart every time the door closed, the dog who had gone so far into fear that he lived under the bed. That was the work, and a puppy was not the work. Puppies were cute. Nobody calls a behaviourist about cute.

Then a family would not stop calling. Messages, then more messages, then a call I finally took, and when I asked them to tell me about the dog they described an adult dog's problems. Biting. Hyperactivity. A house that had stopped being theirs. I asked what breed, how old, and the answer was: she is not a dog, she is a puppy. A street puppy, an Indie, picked up injured off the road and nursed back to health, and now small enough that when the family stood on their bed to get away from her, which is what they were doing when they called me, all they could see of her was the tip of her tail going past the edge of the mattress.

I nearly did not take it. I am glad I did, because it was the first time I was handed a puppy before anything had gone wrong that could not be put right in a month, and it taught me that everything in this book is cheaper at the start.

Nobody calls until the mountain falls

Here is a fact about families and dogs. Almost nobody consults anyone until the mountain has come down on them. The puppy growls over the bowl and it is funny, because look at the size of him. He snaps when you touch his paw and the family laughs, because he is three kilos and furious. He jumps on every guest and the guests love it. The signals are all there, in the first weeks, and they are read as masti, as puppy mischief, and nobody writes them down.

Then he is six months old and twenty kilos, and the growl is not funny, and the snap has teeth behind it, and the jump has knocked a child over. And the family says he changed. He did not change. He grew, and the behaviour grew with him, and nobody had looked at it while it was small.

This family looked. They did not know what they were looking at, but they knew it was not masti, and they called, and that is the whole reason this case ends the way it does.