Chase grew up to be an amazing dog; he was fun, smart creative and the best friend a person could ever have. He didn't start out that way, however. In fact, he was kind of a little shit until he was about 3 years old.
The first real incident was shortly after I brought him home. I let him out to do his business and after chasing him around the little town of Basin, MT for about a half hour, I decided to take a shower and get ready for another eventful day at work. I was working for Alternative Youth Adventures and had just received a promotion, so Chase was kind of a way of celebrating my new position and my new lifestyle of spending more time at home and less time in the back country. Because I was on-call pretty much 24/7 for the duration my groups were in the back country, I had to live within a few miles of our base facility in Boulder. Basin was just down the road and a friend/co-worker was renting a house there so he suggested Chase and I move in.
I jumped in the shower and figured Chase would be alright hanging out in the living room for a few minutes while I did my business. It was winter-time and the house was brick; no insulation and the only heat source was a wood-burning stove with a broken damper. Burning the lodge-pole pine we had taken from an old burn area in the mountains, we could never keep the stove going past 3am so by 6, the house was always down to about 40 degrees. The hot water from the shower was not only welcoming but pretty much the only way to stop from shivering until the stove heated back up melting the frost off the walls. Needless to say, it was sometimes difficult to leave the sanctity of the hot shower. Subsequently, what should be five minutes of unsupervised freedom for Chase, often turned into 10 or 15 or even 20.
On this morning, I didn't think I was in the shower that long. Obviously long though because when I opened the door to run from the warm bathroom to my cold bedroom to jump into some thick layers of wool and fleece, I was stopped in my tracks by Chase lying in the middle of the living room amongst pages and pages of a ripped up paperback my roommate had been reading.
"No!!!" I yelled. I hadn't yelled or even really disciplined Chase until then so he didn't understand the new inflection that was thrust from my mouth. It didn't even startle him. He just lay there chewing away.
Chase cocked his head and looked at me as to say, "What's up?"
"No!" I said again. "No chew!" And I crabbed what was left of the book and smacked him on the nose.
With tail between the legs, Chase ran to his kennel to hide as I cleaned up the mess. I felt bad and after cleaning up the strips of shredded paper I went to Chase's kennel to give him some lovin.
The next day my morning ritual began with another game of chasing Chase around the neighborhood after letting him out to do the deed so-to-speak. After finally catching him, I left him in the living-room again, confident he wasn't going to be chewing up any more books after our little episode from the day before. I definitely shortened my shower though as my 'trust' in him wasn't as solid as I may have wanted. When I opened the bathroom door, Chase was sitting right in front of the door shaking. Apparently, the connecting of the dots wasn't as obvious for him as it was for me. Instead of recognizing the scolding from me as a consequence for chewing up the book, he associated it with me taking a shower. For the next week, Chase waited by the bathroom door while I was in the shower. In fact, even throughout his adult life he always checked on me.
There are plenty of lessons to take from this. Throughout his terrible two's, Chase and I struggled to be on the same page and I learned time and time again that it was much easier setting him up for success rather than allowing him to fail and then trying to teach with consequences. That's not to say there were no, or shouldn't have been any consequences but I was once asked how to keep a dog from getting into the garbage by my insurance agent and when I asked him where he kept the garbage he told me it was left in the kitchen next to the counter. I could tell how frustrated he was because every day he had to clean up after his puppy and he was just about to the end of his rope. "Could you lock the garbage up?" I asked.
The point is, a puppy will be a puppy and if you put situations like an open invitation to dig through the garbage in front of them, they will always fail. Sometimes a little failure leads to a life lesson but in most cases, unless you catch the puppy in the act, they're not going to get the lesson and you'll set yourself up for unnecessary battles that won't accomplish anything but more and more frustration for you and the dog. Lock the garbage up and if you have to take a shower, maybe the kennel is a better option for ten minutes rather than letting them explore freely.
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