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

in Connecticut right through Labor Day, when Scout would be almost five months old. By then she would have had all her shots, which was not a small matter. City pavements can expose puppies to parvo, giardia, and other ailments that can potentially kill them overnight. The green of our backyard seemed a much safer option than the urban wilds of Manhattan.
     
     
    Part of the plan for getting a dog precisely in mid-June was that the weather in Connecticut was likely to be lovely. With any luck, the pestilential heat and humidity of recent summers would hold off until Scout and we got our legs under us. Unfortunately, that’s not how it worked out: instead of sweet spring gliding into summer, the weather was almost tropical and there were sudden thunderstorms nearly every day. Happily Scout showed no fear of the storms, but as she got bigger and feistier we all began to go stircrazy. By the end of June, it was time for Scout to
begin socializing with other dogs and with people. And it was time for us to emerge from our puppy bunker, too.
    Our friend Marian Spiro came to our rescue. Ever since Scout’s homecoming, Marian had been calling us frequently to check in and offer tips. Because her English golden retriever, Cyon, was Henry’s inspiration for finding Scout, Henry considered every morsel of advice from Marian extremely valuable. At eightyfour, she had raised many puppies, including goldens, and she knew how to handle almost every challenging situation.
    Now Marian invited Henry and Scout to join her and Cyon at four o’clock every afternoon so Scout could get to know Cyon and begin to learn some social skills. Marian filled an eight-foot-long baby pool in her backyard for the dogs to splash in, and the afternoon pool party soon became the high point of the day. Although Scout was still too little to climb into the pool, Marian gently introduced her to the water and she took to it right away.
    A longtime friend of Marian’s—an older gentleman named Clyde Campbell who spoke with a honeyed North Carolina drawl—would frequently join the pool party with his dog, Bunny. Another white golden with a rambunctious temperament, Bunny would sometimes splash too energetically in the pool
or stomp on Marian’s flower beds. “Bunny, no!” Clyde would shout in frustration. Gleefully, Henry called me at the office to tell me that he had new best friends, a couple named Bunny and Clyde.
    Dog play can be utterly fascinating, a dance of dominance and submission, engagement and disengagement. At first, the new puppy in their midst interested Cyon and Bunny, but they were accustomed to being a sisterhood of two, and for the most part Scout was happy to watch them from the sidelines while sitting near us. Scout found the two big goldens especially entertaining when they both clamped their teeth on the same tennis ball and held it between them as if in a trance, their bodies in perfect tension for as long as five minutes. Scout knew not to try to get into the middle of that game, but as time went by she began to chase the bigger dogs. When she’d catch their attention, she would quickly lie down on her back in submission, showing her adorable white belly.
    Learning to play with other dogs is about much more than having fun; in fact, it’s probably the most crucial aspect of puppy development. In Animals at Play , Marc Bekoff, a biologist and animal behaviorist, describes the rituals of dog play, including the bow—front legs stretched forward, hips raised—that signals an invitation to play, and the subtle cues that warn another dog that the playing has turned too rough.
“Play is how dogs become card-carrying members of their species,” Bekoff told me when I called to consult him.
    Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know includes a wonderful description of a Chihuahua and a wolfhound playing together with total ease, despite their enormous size difference. “These dogs are so incommensurable