The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout Read Online Free PDF

always cheered up the minute she had company. Cornelia, who had a few weeks of summer break from medical school, had come to Connecticut to help, and we traded off the responsibility for taking care of Scout in the early morning. When it was my turn, I didn’t mind at all. The soulful brown eyes that greeted me had long lashes that gave Scout a sultry, flirtatious look; she was a canine version of Veronica Lake, down to her blond, silky fur. Although dogs supposedly don’t like to be stared at, Scout looked deeply into my reddened, sleep-deprived eyes as if searching for clues. Who was this person? What were all these new smells?
    She liked clamping down on my forearm with those needle-sharp teeth. Soon she was chewing on little rawhide bones, and she went through them like jelly beans. We watched carefully while she chewed, hoping we could prevent her from swallowing any of the pieces she worked so hard to detach.
    Will’s Superman towel now lined the bottom of Scout’s crate, and Henry planned to buy a clock to put in the crate with her. He remembered that his mother, Lynne, had told him a story from her childhood about preparing a little bed for her new puppy, Nicky. Nicky slept in a laundry basket filled with soft, clean blankets, into which Lynne tucked an old-fashioned windup alarm clock. When Henry had asked her why she put the clock in the basket, Lynne answered, “The ticking reminded Nicky of her mother’s heartbeat.” This story was especially meaningful to Henry because his mother had died in her sixties of heart trouble.
    Scout looked awfully little in her crate, but her big paws were a tip-off that she wasn’t going to stay small. While she slept, I loved watching her little back as it rose and fell. Even so, I still sometimes worried that I might not love Scout as much as Buddy, a fear I kept to myself. I didn’t know it then, but this is a very common worry of new dog owners.
    It’s also not unusual for new dog owners to be reminded of their experiences with infants. In fact, our response to a puppy may be partly hormonal. John Homans, who wrote a perceptive article about dogs and their owners for New York magazine, noted that a recent study showed that a dog’s gaze increases oxytocin levels in its owner, and oxytocin is the same hormone that creates such intense bonding between a baby and its mother.
    Jill and Scout soon after Scout’s arrival in Connecticut
    It’s long been understood that puppies stir powerful feelings in humans; in fact, over the thousands of years that dogs have been domesticated, breeders have purposely preserved their puppy characteristics, which is one reason why so many older dogs act like perpetual puppies. Temple Grandin, a widely respected animal behaviorist who raised many golden retrievers earlier in her life, was one of several experts I consulted during Scout’s early puppyhood. She told me that breeders have also bred dogs to be hypersocialized. “So it’s natural,” Grandin said, “that some people treat their dogs like children. And the dogs are very attuned to us.” Grandin, who is autistic, has written a number of books, and I found one of them, Animals Make Us Human , especially useful.
    I consulted a number of other books as well. Next to Grandin’s book on our shelf was a volume by the monks of New Skete, guide-dog trainers who lived in an Eastern Orthodox monastic community in upstate New York. The monks have written several extremely readable and useful dog-training manuals, including The Art of Raising a Puppy and How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend. I was amused one day when I realized that Henry and I used these books the same way our parents had turned to Dr. Spock to help raise us.
    The monks’ general precepts made a lot of sense to us, and their daily regimen for new puppies comported with our idea of how a day with a dog ought to go. Passionate advocates of a rural life, the monks were so persuasive on the subject that Henry decided to stay