Truffle Makes His Mark

Truffle has been with us for six weeks now, and he has come a long way from the quasi-inert dog who just wanted to be left alone. He has mastered eye contact, stands his ground with the cat Telemann, and has moments of giddy joy when he pulls back his ears and pats the ground with his forepaws, inviting me to play. All this is as I hoped things would go when I adopted him—with one exception. (Warning: if descriptions of canine urinary habits gross you out, you may wish to leave now. I hope by next week to have a more civilized topic to offer). I knew that several factors in Truffle’s history might make house training difficult. Having spent his entire life in a cage, he had never learned to relieve himself outdoors. And having been neutered at the age of seven, after years of service as a stud dog, the habit of dribbling drops of urine to signal his macho credentials was well ingrained. But I had housetrained a dozen dogs before, so how hard could this be?

All I needed to do was give Truffle my undivided attention for a few days, and all would be well. The snow was too deep for His Tininess to venture outdoors, but friends with small dogs spoke enthusiastically of pee pads and the flexibility they allowed. So I bought some extra-large pee pads and a plastic fence to set on top of them. Having learned from Truffle’s foster mother the operative command—“go potty!” spoken in a coloratura warble—I proceeded with the training.

I placed the pee pad in the mud room, carried in a chair and my laptop, and spent most of the first forty-eight hours there. Things went fairly well. When given no other choice, Truffle did his business on the pee pad, or near it, spraying the plastic fence as he lifted his leg. Whenever anything, liquid or solid, exited his body onto the pad, I broke into songs of praise and thanksgiving and offered him a morsel of dehydrated turkey heart.

Soon, however, tasks outside the mud room required my attention, so after a few days I enlarged Truffle’s territory to include the kitchen. Not wanting to isolate him for long, whenever I left his space I would carry him and set him down on a bed, sofa, or chair near where I planned to be. Mercifully, he wasn’t able to get down from these places, nor did he relieve himself on them.

But this is when the trouble started. If he was within a few feet of the pee pad and the spirit moved him, he would lift his leg and mark the wall, the bottom of a cabinet, even his own water bowl. If I let him loose in the house, no matter how recently he had emptied his bladder he would baptize the furniture legs. A few times I was able to jump up and rush him to the pee pad to finish, but mostly I just found random yellow puddles everywhere. Was this his way of saying, “I am Truffle, and this is my domain”?

The perpetual, frantic vigilance was taking a toll on me. I would turn on the teakettle without filling it, set down my toothbrush to carry Truffle to his loathsome pee pad and forget to finish brushing. Also, the poor dog was getting zero exercise. To prevent accidents I had to keep him with me at all times, so he ended up sitting around a lot. I worried that by spring he would be totally deconditioned.

Then a wise friend suggested that I use a belly band—a wide cloth belt designed to go around a male dog’s abdomen and cover up the penis. At first, I recoiled. A belly band! Never in all my dog training years had I used such a thing, which seemed like a shameful crutch, the kind of shortcut that ends up postponing the real solution forever. But in desperation a couple of days ago I gave up and put a belly band on Truffle. Now life has returned to semi-normal. Truffle is free to trot around the house while I read or write, and I can concentrate on things other than the state of his bladder.

Will he ever be truly house trained? Will we depend on belly bands forever? Right now I am too weary to care. It’s brutally cold outside, but today I heard a chickadee sing, a sign that spring is on the way. When it arrives a new era will begin for Truffle, filled with trees, bushes, random sticks, and fire hydrants on which to write, “Truffle was here.”