Good Boy

I'm sitting here typing, looking over at a perfectly defenseless puppy sleeping in a cage that seems to me, a child of the '80s, more suited to a toucan or perhaps an iguana. Anticipating your next question, the answer is yes, I can absolutely tpye withuto lokonig.

The puppy sleeps in the cage not for any of the other obvious reasons for animal caging: zoo display, scientific control group, fattening for slaughter, etc. Neither is it in the cage because I secretly wish he were a toucan or iguana. Note that this latter point does not preclude the wish for a toucan or an iguana, only that the puppy in the cage is not there specifically as a proxy. It's important to me that that is clear.

No, the puppy is caged because I have been told, but no less of an authority than the 17-year-old girl whose mall job is working at a puppy vendor, that puppy caging is, in these latter days, the Thing To Do. Had the Fates conspired so that instead Hot Dog on a Stick were hiring on the day it came upon this earnest young woman to seek employment, I have no doubt she would have urged me with just as much sincerity and naked enthusiasm for my well being to ingest reasonably priced deep-fried jalapeno-flavored cheese. On a stick.

This is how Conventional Wisdom works: the verifiable authority of information is measured primarily by a certain triangulation of transmission from plural, unrelated, uncoordinated sources. Proof has less to do with the citation of a verifiable source or the examination of data scientifically arrived at and compiled and more along the lines of someone saying "Yeah, I heard that too."

I heard someone used what is euphemistically called "crate training" to housebreak their dog. And then, there I was, buying a dog at a mall and then dutifully shelling over additional moneys completely of my own free will for a black wire cage to house the animal in simply because Shanice, the mall employee, had independently confirmed for me, with absolutely no prompting, that such an idea indeed existed.

Like most forms of Conventional Wisdom, the roots of this crate training idea are vague and deeply buried. It really wasn't all that long ago, when I was a younger person, that a dog in a cage was something you'd only see when ordering from a restaurant on the Asian mainland. Like most people, my dogs were all housetrained with the tried and true, all-American rolled-up-magazine-and-occasionally-thrown-shoe method. It was complicated what with the two separate steps, sure, but it had the compelling benefit of being cheap. I mean, I was already wearing shoes. And you didn't even need a subscription; the one magazine was more than ample, especially if it was a Glamour or something similarly advertising-heavy. One could fashion four or five separate training aids from a single Vogue. Plus as an added bonus, your weapon of choice for defeating unwanted excrement would always leave your hands smelling like Calvin Klein's Eternity Purple Orchid.

I am in favor of housebreaking, of course. Like most Americans, I'm culturally conditioned to accept no rule-defying deposits of feces in the living area unless it was offered by someone whose name is on the mortgage.

And the avoidance of that, the forcible bending of cohabiting personalities into compliance with an established acceptable cultural condition, is how we in my household find ourselves at the absurd, heretofore unknown and unimagined crossroads of crate training.

The weird thing I noticed about the puppy, though, is this: it resists the cage at first. It knows it means isolation and loss of freedom and conditioning by force. But after a while, the puppy kind of begins to love the cage.