The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout by Jill Abramson Read Free Book Online Page B

always by our side at the table, pleading at us with those irresistible brown eyes and batting those big lashes. Soon she began barking at us while we were eating. When she wouldn’t stop, we had to enforce time-outs and shut her in our laundry room while we downed a meal and listened, all of us miserable, to her pathetic whimpering.
    In desperation, I called Jane Mayer, who had trained three Labrador retrievers, including Peaches, yellow and regal, for whom we occasionally dog-sat. Peaches was mellow about everything but food. Once, when I was in the kitchen baking a cake, a stick of butter was softening on the counter. In the instant I turned around to get the eggs out of the fridge, the butter was gone. Peaches had only a slightly guilty expression on her face.
    “Food can be your friend,” Jane told me. “It is a great reward. She wants to please you, and a treat will help you reinforce her good behavior. Stop focusing so much on what displeases you.” Since working together on our book about Clarence Thomas, we often turned to each other for advice when we were covering tough stories or experiencing difficulties in our careers. “Jill, you handled Howell Raines,” Jane reminded me, referring to a former Times executive editor with whom I had often clashed. “You can handle a puppy.”
    Henry’s strict approach to feeding Scout began to bend when Marian Spiro, whom we considered the ultimate dog authority, agreed with Jane that puppy treats were useful for marking Scout’s good behavior. “Use them when you are practicing basic commands like Sit, Stay, and Come,” she urged us. Cyon’s favorite, Marian told me during a walk at the farm, was Pup-Peroni, especially the “original bacon recipe.” (It comes in a bright red package, and thanks to the pet food industry’s slick marketing it looks pretty delicious.) When Marian offered my ravenous pup a little taste of the soft beefy treat, Scout’s face reminded me of Cornelia’s thrilled expression as a toddler when, against my better judgment, I let her have some Cheetos. From then on, whenever Scout saw us drop the red package of Pup-Peroni onto our kitchen counter after
one of our regular shopping sprees at Petco, she recognized it immediately and practically toppled over in ecstasy.
     
     
    As summer drew to a close, a deadline loomed: by Labor Day we had to finish preparing Scout for her introduction to Manhattan. I couldn’t wait for her to join me in the city. After my two-week vacation in August, during which I had bonded much more intensely to Scout, I found the weekdays without her almost intolerable.
    I knew the transition from Connecticut to New York wouldn’t be seamless. For one thing, we couldn’t assume that months of housebreaking in the country would carry over. Still, it had been many weeks since Scout had had an accident inside our house, so we were fairly confident that she would quickly learn to wait for an elevator before getting outside our building, though it might prove harder for her to become used to relieving herself on communal pavement instead of the grass on our lawn.
    Before she became a part-time city dog, Scout needed to learn how to walk on a leash, and we had already begun practicing. As we moved along our street in Connecticut one day, I thought things were
going pretty well until I felt a tug, looked behind me, and saw Scout on her back, her adorable belly exposed, snapping at the leash like a turtle. For her, the leash was simply another object begging for a good chew. More troubling, Scout invariably lunged if a squirrel or chipmunk crossed the road near us. I worried about how she would do crossing the busy, traffic-choked streets of Tribeca.
    Sometimes we practiced walking her on a leash at the farm. After one long session during which Henry walked Scout while wearing wet, ill-fitting shoes, he developed painful tendonitis. Now, at least for the time being, I became Scout’s sole leash instructor and my left