Deck the Halls: Managing Your Dog During the Holidays - a podcast by Ty Brown

Today, I want to write a little about getting your dog ready for Christmas. In my house, we’ve got the Christmas tree, stockings hung by the chimney with care, and all sorts of other Christmas gear. My wife has a blog that a bunch of people read, and this year a company asked her if they could decorate our house for free if she wrote about it. So we’ve got some awesome decorations.

Every year around Christmas, people run into problems with their dogs. Stockings, packages, trees—they’re all an issue! Dogs will rip up the gifts, pee on the stockings, tear down the tree, and all other sorts of stuff. The solution to this is simple, because it doesn't require a ton of effort to get your dog to behave. Unfortunately, a lot of people change the variables in their home and don't think about their dogs.

Think about the scientific process for a minute. We start with a baseline. If we want to test something, we change a variable and watch how the baseline changes. Most people bring a lot of stuff into their house at Christmastime, which means they’ve changed several variables but haven't put themselves in a position to observe the results. They go about their business without having set up any sort of scenarios to make sure that their dog interacts with their possessions in the proper way. That’s really what socialization is: influencing how our dogs respond to the environment. That environment might include other dogs, people, children, cars, shopping carts—or holiday decorations! Se need to look at this problem scientifically, change our variables, and look at the results.

My dog Honey is celebrating her thirteenth Christmas in our family. I know exactly what to expect from her. I’ve seen her response to decorations in the several homes we’ve lived in over the past thirteen years. Now, the first year I had her, I had to observe her quite a bit. She wanted to get into the packages, so I had to correct that. My other dog, Rocco, wanted to pee on the tree at first (he loved peeing on stuff—who doesn’t?) so I had to correct that. When the dogs respond appropriately, I observe and praise them. Simple as that!

Further episodes of Ty the Dog Guy on the Daily

Further podcasts by Ty Brown

Website of Ty Brown