Puppy training... woes!

People. Who would have thought that training a puppy was going to take up sooooo much time and energy?!

Ok - I did. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, I knew it would make my skin crawl when the inevitable accidents happened... peeing on the rug, pooping on the kitchen floor then seeing her go to eat it. I saw it all coming, I knew it was going to stressful but I chose to do it anyway. So often in life I see people make decisions like this - why do we do it?

Our guts tell us that it's going to turn out like this but we go ahead anyway. Our guts tell us one thing (in my case, 99% of the time it's giving me the right advice) but we our heads tell us the opposite and we follow what our crooked thinking tells us. I have a theory...

I think we chose to listen to our heads rather than our guts because we like to think of ourselves as an evolved, intelligent species - using our enlarged craniums to guide the way, somehow being able to compute millions of variables and possible outcomes with possible solutions - on the fly, to a high degree of accuracy. Why would I believe that when I count out the letters of my passwords on my fingers when my internet-banking site asks for the 3rd and 8th letters? :) When we hear our guts, no matter how in-tuned we are to what we hear it telling us, it reminds us that we were once animals - eating our poop and peeing on the proverbial lamp-posts of 100,000 B.C. (or whenever it was before our ape-like ancestors started shedding body hair and growing grey matter). We don't like it, we're no longer animals, we're evolved, clever, cunning, masters of our destinies. I think we listen to the often misleading - media-swamped, government conditioned, pseudo-babble - inner monologue that our brains spit out - because it flatters our egos to think we're super intelligent.

But anyway... enough of that waffle. It's Sunday and although Sundays are a good time to read a broadsheet with your morning coffee and engage in "isn't it terrible what's going in the Congo" type conversation with your brunch-pals, instead of fingering through the copy US magazine you 'borrowed' from your girlfriend, there is a time and place for such navel-contemplated - and now is not it or there.

Our puppy... We wake in the morning to find a pile of poop on the kitchen floor. When ever she needs to pee we often can't get to her in time if we see her do her pre-pee / sniffing the ground and going in circles routine. When we're not around or there to see the pre-pee routine it's 50/50 as to whether or not she goes on the pee-pad (disgusting diaper-like-but-flat paper things that lay on the floor for your puppy to slash all over, if it remembers where to go... When we leave her alone when she doesn't want to be alone she'll dump a load on the floor and if she's really upset, she'll eat it (that's right folks! MING CENTRAL!!!). Or she'll pee right next to the pee-pad, not ON it, NEXT TO it. Mother-F-er!!! :)

But I have to admit, as much as training her is difficult and not a quick process, when she does go outside and not inside the apartment I'm filled with joy (relief? joy and relief? - whatever) and it feels GOOD! She's a little star in all honesty. She doesn't howl or cry endlessly when she's on her own, she behaves herself most of the time and loves to be around people. She loves to play with children and other dogs - big and small - a real star. Although my near-OCD like tendencies kick in every time I spot an accident, or think about where her paws have been as she runs around the apartment... I love her and don't regret the day we brought her home from the pet store one little bit.

Now, before I sign off... puppy training tips people - gimme some!! A-woooooooowwwwww! :)