The day you bring home the fluffy ball that will soon grow into your beloved four-legged family member is one of the most exhilarating—and stressful—days of your life. The kids are excited, the puppy is happy and out of control one minute, asleep the next, and you quickly realize that maybe all your careful reading didn’t give you a realistic idea of how much your life would change by welcoming a pet into your home.
Fluffy prefers her dinner warm, with gravy, and her carrots peeled—thank you very much. Fido refuses to stay home alone and requires doggy daycare every day.
What Will You Do for Your Pet?
We’ve all gone above and beyond for our pets at some point. Whether it’s cooking special meals, giving up the idea of a yearly vacation to cover daycare costs, going home during lunch to let our pets outside to pee, or spending money we don’t have to ensure they’re happy and healthy, it’s hard not to go overboard when we love them. They’ve become such an important part of our lives and our families.
In North America, we tend to overindulge our pets. While it’s true there are dogs that do not have a happy or healthy home life, this article refers to those dogs that are fussed over, cosseted, and pampered. This article is not about rescue or adopted dogs—their new owners often face a different set of challenges.
This article is about the pups that sleep on our beds, eat better than many people, have their groomers on speed dial, and are overindulged in almost every aspect of their lives.
How to Combat the Pet Overindulging Cycle
The reality is that our dogs are a product of our conditioning and training—we make our pets what they are!
If Fluffy wants her dinner warmed, you have no one to blame but yourself. Guaranteed, no dog will starve itself if there is perfectly good, cold food available. But because she knows you’ll pop it in the microwave if she refuses to eat it as served, why should she suffer?
We, their faithful humans, often unwittingly encourage separation anxiety and/or destructive behavior when they are home alone. Instead of properly crate-training a puppy as a young pet, we leave them loose in the house and fuss over them as we come and go. Although some may see crates as cages, a crate actually provides a pup with a den—a safe space they can call their own. For the rest of their lives, this den signifies a place of security and keeps them safe and unable to cause trouble when left alone.
Is your couch half chewed up? Are your neighbors complaining about the howling? Crate training would have solved those problems before they even started.
The good news is that it’s never too late to retrain your pet. Put Fluffy’s dish on the ground with cold food in it and wait her out. Eventually, she’ll eat it. Start crate training Fido over the course of a few months, and once he’s comfortable in his den, quietly leave the house for a few minutes—or until he’s calm. When you come home, don’t make a fuss—leave him in the crate until he settles down.
You can retrain your pet to follow your rules instead of letting him be the boss of the house. It takes time and energy, but no more effort than it takes to heat dinner, drive to doggy daycare, or buy a new couch every few months when the old one is too chewed up to sit on.
