Hanging on to Poo Mountain

Jun 17, 2014 by Yvonne Treen

Hanging on to Poo Mountain

Learning to give up on what‘s not working

We got a puppy three weeks ago.  You get a lot of advice when you get a puppy.  The manager at the pet shop down the road wrote out a daily schedule for us. To cut to the chase – you take the dog out a lot so it can do its business in the back yard and not in your house. 

Your crowning achievement will not be that you got the dog to sit or stay, but that you got the dog to go outside.  It feels like that right now because the dog knows the sit command but the toilet training is still ongoing.  The Dummies book gave its support to this idea, we were on our way.

The advice was to create ‘poo mountain’ – basically the collected products of the puppy in one magical spot on the back lawn.  The theory being that the dog will learn to go there by association.  We ran some action research to see what the schedule should be – indicative timings to create some sort of routine.  We started out with hope in our hearts.  We do training and coaching with people – how hard can this be?

In reality the dog avoids poo mountain – it’s just not nice to go there.  The law of unintended consequences has also been at work.  Flies like it.  It’s hard to spot in the dark.  The guy who mows our lawn did not spot poo mountain until too late.  He almost managed to obliterate it but not quite.  We have avoided talking to him about it because we feel guilty we forgot to warn him.  I hope he comes back.

My problem is that I can see poo mountain is a bit of a loser idea but it seems to make common sense, coming from someone with experience, I also read the same advice in a book, and (crucially) we have yet to come up with a better idea.

Sometimes what you think is the comfort zone is not that comfortable after all.

In truth, we often hang on to things that do not work very well, hoping that they will eventually.  Our patience and tenacity will be rewarded.  The continued presence of the not-working-solution stops us from experimenting with new ideas/new people/models/tools.

 So poo mountain has to go. I think the dog will be as relieved (pun alert) as we will be.  I reckon the lawn mowing guy will be ecstatic - if he comes back.