It’s puppy season again and new owners everywhere are falling in and out and back in love with their new best pals. My Jack is nearly through the puppy stage now, but memories of our little terror are still vivid in my mind. So here is Miss D’s definitive list of products that make the road to puppy ownership a little less, erm, slippery.

1. Puppy School

Puppy School is taking off all over the world. The idea is, a bunch of starry-eyed owners and their ridiculously cute new pets gather together in council halls and veterinary surgeries in the first week. You get to learn all about What You’re In For, and get the fun of watching every puppy grow even bigger and cuter over the weeks as their owners develop worry lines, nervous twitches, marital problems, etc.

Seriously though, puppy school is the single best thing we did for ourselves and our sanity. Ours had the cutest puppies in it, Bouncy the poodle, Ben the Boxer, Jazzy the Bitza. Jack was a fearful little pup and I’m sure that puppy school went a long way towards making him the happy little soul he is today. And as for myself, I hold onto a mantra that the trainer gave me: “Just think how calm he’ll be when he’s eight.”

2. Puppy pads

Puppy pads are to puppy owners what nappies are to mums and dads. They may not be cheap, or environmentally friendly, but geez, they make the job of toilet training easier. We bought the wickedly expensive ones at first and then graduated to the cheaper model, available at K-Mart. Jack took to them like a dream. The expensive ones, I must admit, turn liquid to an easy-to-pick-up gel, and have some kind of chemical attractant embedded within them so the pup doesn’t need much encouragement to use them. But the cheap ones do well too. We had all kinds of dramas getting Jack to go on newspaper. Puppy pads made it all much much easier.

3. Wizdog

As you might gather from the sidebar, I’m like a Wizdog Pusher or something. This simple little tray to hold newspaper for your dog is one of the smartest products I’ve seen for dogs. Once Jack was paper trained, moving him on to the Wizdog was easy. I loved that it held your standard newspaper and was so easy to clean.

4. Positive Dog Training

The book that Jack eventually chewed to bits. It is a great introduction to the philosophy of positive training. If you’ve been tempted to scold or hit your dog, or resort to vinegar and water-type remedies, have a read of this for a different perspective. It’s a great introduction to the technique and taught me so much about managing Jack without losing my temper. The result is a happy, trusting dog who does what I ask and comes when he’s called – I’m amazed.

5. Puppy Kong

Oh the Kong the Kong! (Sing it with me now.) The kong is another of those Greatest Dog Inventions Ever, and I’ll never be convinced otherwise. It’s pretty simple really. If you’ve got an indoor dog, you need a Kong.

6. Everlasting Treat Ball

If you’re feeding your puppy in a bowl, you’re missing out on a really fun opportunity to keep him happy and out of your hair. We moved Jack onto the everlasting treat ball when he was about six months old, and have never looked back. Six month old dogs are, if you’ll pardon my French, a pain in the tits. The combination of everlasting treat ball plus plastic funnel plus kibble keeps Jack out of our hair for hours. He loves it, we love it, everyone’s happy. I’ve worked “Where’s your ball” into Jack’s training routine, so he can help us find it when, once again, we lose the bloody thing.

7. Crate
Crates are controversial in Australia – most people’s instinct tell them that a dog in a cage = bad news. But I suspect that as society becomes more urbanised, we’ll embrace the idea. I bought a crate for Jack when we moved back to the inner city. We couldn’t let him sleep outside because he was barking all night at every little noise. But our new house was too small to have him sleep inside, either. A covered crate with a fancy-pants dog bed in it was the perfect solution. Jack sleeps in there all the time, and at night we close the latch and he doesn’t seem to mind. He took to it the day we bought it with nary a squeak of complaint. Get a folding one so you can fit it in the car. And make sure your dog can stand with his head held hight, and turn around comfortably, or else the RSPCA will get all grumpy with ya.

8. Car strap
Jack’s car harness is one of those gadgets that makes me glad to be living in the twenty-first century. Admittedly there’s a bit of wrestling involved in getting him into the harness and snapped onto the seatbelt, but it’s getting easier with time. And the payoff is great – Jack can’t jump around the car, and in an accident, he’d have a similar level of seatbelt protection to the rest of the family.

9. Stain remover - BioZet

Anything you can do to make clean up quick and easy will go a long way to reducing the stress of toilet training on yourself. For us, biozet was an easy and affordable answer to cleaning fabric, floorboards and carpet. It’s got enzymy thingies in it that break down the chemicals that puppies leave behind when they pee. That way, you don’t get repeat offenses once you’ve cleaned it up.

10. Aloveen Shampoo
This isn’t the only ph balanced moisturising shampoo on the market, and by no means the cheapest. But it was a godsend for us when Jack had an itchy skin complaint. We had the vet’s blessing to use this stuff up to three times a week. It smells nice and doesn’t dry a dog’s skin like many shampoos do.

Life in the city is all about picking up poo. It’s an issue that presses the buttons of non dog owners and it’s easy to understand why – doggy doo is horrible, horrible stuff. But that said – it’s a job that gets easier! I don’t know why, but I’m not nearly as grossed out by the task as I was four months ago. Once I got hold of the stylish and biodegradable “bags on board” the task kind of faded into the background.

The number one reason you should scoop your dog’s poop is so people (especially little people) don’t step in it. That’s pretty self explanatory, eh? It keeps people from running “ban dogs from everywhere” campaigns.

But the number two reason, and one that I didn’t really cop onto until it was pointed out to me, is that it gets washed into waterways and can cause major major problems like e-coli pollution. Yuk! Liquid dog poo! So if, like me, you thought that having Poochy “go” in a non-pedestrian area gave you a get out of jail card think again. Dog poo is even nastier than human waste. You have to pick it all up.

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I’d recommend Karen Pryor’s methods a gazillion times over. She clever. Crate training is a new and controversial idea in Australia, so if you want to leave that step out, you’ll still get good results by keeping a close eye on your puppy.

Picking up dog poo gives me the shudders, but the thought of all those dog-park doos encased in plastic bags until the next ice age is even more shuddersome. I was taking plastic bags and newspaper with me everywhere I went, and then emptying the paper into the bin, until one terrible day at the post office, when I’d forgotten that I couldn’t find a bin and I opened my backpack, thinking I’d pull out an innocent carton of cigarettes that a friend had left at my place in a fit of short-lived virtue (it’s a long story) when suddenly myself and the postmistress were hit in the face by the fresh ripe smell of…

I won’t go on. Let’s just say it was a memory too terrible to re-live.

Enter “Bags on Board”. It clips to your dog’s leash so you can’t vague out and forget it (hooray!) and dispenses environmentally-friendly plastic bags (double hooray!) It’s even available in a stylish leopardskin print! (TRIPLE HOORAY!!!)

Much to my surprise, I’ve found that it’s not as harrowing as I thought to just scoop Jack’s business with a plastic covered hand. I guess it’s the high smug factor from all that biodegradability that gets ya through.

RATING:
BUY IT: Australia / USA
COST: From AUD$9.95 (US $3.59)

We were using the minty freshness of Walkabout Stain Remover on any of Jack and Mei Mei’s little “accidents” until we discovered a cheaper alternative.

Biozet, the clothes washing powder you can buy at any ol’ supermarket in this country, breaks down enzymes, contains no ammonia, and is even environmentally friendly! We use it to machine wash Jack’s bed and his fluffy toys, and chuck a scoop into the mop bucket to clean up anything left on the floor. You can mix some up in a spray bottle too, and it apparently works a treat on carpet stains.

You have to be careful what you choose for cleaning up pet stains – just because you can’t smell the pheromones left by the stain, doesn’t mean your pet can’t. And he’ll go back to that spot again and again unless you clean it with something that thoroughly breaks the chemicals down. Cleaning with normal household products won’t work because they leave ammonia behind, and pet pee is all about ammonia.

At AUD$5.56 for a kilo, the only cheaper solution is the old fifty fifty solution of vinegar and water. It probably works just as well as Biozet, but Irish gets twitchy if his cleaning products aren’t packed with sudsy chemicals so Biozet is a happy compromise for us both. Even Choice Magazine gives it a big thumbs up.

Incidentally, trying to take a product shot of a washing powder is a fraught decision. Should I take yet another “Worried-looking Jack with product” shot?

Or should I do a “Mei Mei sniffs product” shot instead?

In the end, I just went with “boring-but-safe”.

The life of a pet product blogger is a minefied of decisions, I tells ya.

RATING:
BUY IT: Your local supermarket!
COST: AUD$5.95