Honey the Great Dane

My new home is very different from my old one back in Auckland. 

First, it has those slippery wooden floors…although I have to say, I am getting much better and confident about walking on them now! In fact, even though my humans put down rugs for me, I sometimes prefer to just lie on the bare, wooden floor. 

My new home is also much bigger – there are lots of rooms in the top part… 

…and then there are stairs IN the house (I’ve never had those before!) which go down to a big room in the bottom part. The stairs are very narrow and steep so I find them quite difficult to go up and down. 

Because the house is built on the side of a hill, the garden at the back is lower than the front of the house. 

So you have to go down the stairs and through the big room at the bottom of the house to get to the garden… 

  

…so I don’t go there much coz it’s very hard for a big dog like me to go down so many steep steps and it is probably not very good for my joints. 

But that’s OK because there is a small patch of grass at the front of the house where I can lie and sun myself… 

There are some other strange things in this new home too…like a big hole in the kitchen wall where I can see my humans - 

 

- and hey, it even comes with a place to rest my big heavy head when I’m tired of holding it up!  

 

I made sure that I found all the sunny patches in my new home very quickly… (Hsin-Yi can’t believe that I would still want to sun myself in this hot weather but actually, I am getting used to it and have stopped panting all the time – and anyway, I just LOOOOOVE the sun! )  

 

 And guess what? My new home comes complete with a doggie neighbour! He is a Bull Terrier and he looks very sweet – although I have only sniffed noses with him through the fence. We have not met his humans but we have heard them calling him so we think his name is Monty. 

 

We feel a bit sorry for him because he is left alone in the garden the whole day, often till 6pm in the evenings -  his humans must be away at work a long time – but at least when they come home, they always let him into the house with them. Many other doggies in Australia seem to be “outside dogs” and are not allowed to go into the home to be with their families at all  - and are often not even taken for walks either, because their humans think that just having a big garden is enough!  

 

When I first arrived in my new home, the rooms were all very empty… 

 

…because our things which were coming on the ship from NZ hadn’t arrived yet. So my humans had nothing to sit on, sleep on, cook or eat with! So they went to one of Hsin-Yi’s favourite places in the world, called IKEA, and bought a few things just so they could live until our things arrived. 

Our sofa in Auckland was very old and made of wool – and that would not be nice to sit on in the hot, humid weather here – so my humans sold it and got a new one here! Hsin-Yi is really happy with it because it has washable covers – which is very good for a doggie household that gets lots of hair, mud and slobber!  

Here is a picture of us enjoying the new sofa…and see how big my new beanbag bed is??!! 

 

 But last weekend, our things arrived from NZ and we had lots of Mover Humans come to the house again… 

 

…and lots of boxes and mess everywhere… 

 

…of course, I had the important job of supervising again! 

 

(Hsin-Yi: our movers this time were wonderful: courteous, careful and efficient - they restored my faith in removal companies! The company in Auckland was called AusMove and their partner in Brisbane was called Wridgeways – I highly recommend them if anyone is moving between Australia & New Zealand!) 

 

 So this week, my humans are very busy again with unpacking and sorting stuff (and they are starting to do the Work thing again too – so that’s why they haven’t had much time to help me with blogging stuff!). 

 Well, one thing that hasn’t changed in my new home is my “house rules”! See, my humans have always been very strict about me following certain rules around the house – from the 1st day I arrived as a baby puppy. For example, I learnt to stay out of the kitchen, to only toilet in a special corner of the garden (NOT on the lawn!), to Sit at the front door when we have visitors and to never go out the front door or beyond the driveway unless I had permission. 

 My humans taught me these rules using commands like “Out!” and “Wait”, my toileting command (“Be Clean”) and my release word, “OK!” – (in the beginning, when I was really little and didn’t understand these commands yet, they had to guide me and use barriers like ’baby gates’ to help me learn) –  it took a lot of consistent repetition in the beginning but once I learnt these good habits, it made life very easy and I could enjoy more freedom around the house because my humans trusted me. 

For example, I can safely stay in the front garden by myself – even with the gates open… 

 

Here is a video showing how I “re-learned” these rules in my new home: 

  

A lot of people ask Hsin-Yi how she taught me these rules so well – the secret to training us doggies successfully is to be 100% consistent and to set up the situation and practise before trying to do it in the real thing. Most people fail because they don’t take time to set up and practise a situation – for example, polite manners at the front door: they only try to control us when visitors come for real and us doggies are super-excited and they get flustered and embarrassed and worried about keeping the visitors waiting…and so they let it go “just this once” but of course, we doggies learn that this means we can get away with naughty behaviour if we just push our humans long enough!  

When I was learning this rule, Hsin-Yi got Paul to knock on the door lots of times, so I would get excited and then she could practise my door manners with me – and she has also shut the door in visitors’ faces a lot of times, until I could learn to remain sitting calmly when it opened!  

This way, us doggies learn that we can never get away with it – not even once,  no matter what we try! – and after a while, we stop trying and it just becomes a good habit. In general, if you never give us doggies a chance to learn bad habits, we will never think of doing them. But give in to us even once in the beginning and we will try even harder next time! Every command that is given to us MUST be enforced – no exceptions – otherwise, it is better not to give the command at all, because it will teach us to ignore our humans. 

You might be wondering why my humans keep the gates open in the front garden – this is because Hsin-Yi does not like dogs that patrol and rush fences, barking at people passing. It encourages aggressive-type behaviours in us doggies, which can then start extending outside the home to barking and lunging when out on walks, etc…

Of course, it is natural territorial behaviour for us doggies to bark at strangers but it is important that humans teach us what is “our territory” and that we should stop barking once we have alerted our pack leaders (our humans). Just rushing aggressively at fences is a bad behaviour to encourage. Dogs who are kept unsupervised all the time in gardens with people walking past, often learn this bad habit very quickly!  Because we doggies think people move away because we scared them off with our barking (when actually, they would have walked on past anyway) – we think we are successful and get rewarded for it – and so we start repeating this behaviour A LOT. And if our humans are not there to supervise and correct this behaviour, we think it is OK to do this. 

Us doggies will see any “barrier” as the limit of our territory and will rush to protect it (this is why we often bark & get aggressive in cars but are fine out on the street). By only having the front door as the “barrier” between me and the street, my humans teach me that my territory ends at the front door. By keeping the gate open, there is no barrier so I think that the front garden is just a continuation of the street and I don’t get territorial if someone is just walking past on the pavement. Anyway, I think even if someone just saw me behind the screen door, from the street, they would think twice about coming into our garden – gate or no gate! Hee! Hee!  

And by the way, in case you don’t think I make a very good guard dog (due to certain photos with stuffies in the past – ahem!), here is a picture of me on guard duty…believe me, it’s very hard work!  

 

Now you might be thinking that it’s a bit mean making me follow all these rules when I’m just settling into my new home…well, actually, having rules and routines and boundaries actually makes us doggies feel much more happy and secure. We know where we stand and what is expected of us – and this is very important to us. This is a common mistake humans make with ‘rescue doggies’ because they feel sorry for them so they spoil them in their new homes and think they should let them get away with things for a while…and then they can’t understand why their rescue doggies start developing all sorts of anxiety and behavioural problems! In fact, my humans have been surprised at how well I have taken the whole move and it is partly because I have had these familiar old rules to hang on to and give structure and routine to my new life!

Well, I have written a mammoth post again so I’d better stop but I hope you have enjoyed the tour of my new home! 

Again, I am so sorry that I have not been able to visit your blogs – hopefully, Hsin-Yi will be less busy next week after all the unpacking and sorting is finished and then she can help me do more blog stuff again!