The initial weeks were challenging. Tito would pee and poop anywhere he pleased. Our impassioned yells, followed by desperate attempts to pick him up in the middle of his act and rush him to the garden, terrified him. I realized that our anxiety was proving counterproductive. I’d read about the use of newspapers to toilet-train puppies. We decided to use the idea. We would pick Tito up and put him on a newspaper as soon as he took a position to pee or poop. He soon began to associate the newspaper spread on the floor with the act of relieving himself. We also began taking Tito out to the garden every few hours, spreading the newspaper on the grass and encouraging him to pee and poop. He frequently would not oblige as there was no need to pee or poop. It took about a week for Tito to get the message that he should pee and poop outside – in the bushes in the garden. The newspaper was no longer required. The newspaper trick did indeed work to toilet-train Tito! Soon, he started indicating to us that he wanted to go out whenever he needed to relieve himself by standing behind the door and wagging his tail. We would also take Tito out into the garden just before he went to bed and then again in the morning as soon as he woke up. It wasn’t necessary to take him out during the night.
We learned from one of our friends with pets the difficulty they had faced toilet-training their pup. Our anxieties are perhaps the reason why the efforts to train a pet often take much longer than required. It is also useful to search for creative solutions to training that have worked well. Once the key hurdle of toilet training was accomplished, Tito quickly transformed into a handsome, rambunctious puppy who was entirely at ease with his new world.
Organizations often fail to deal with the anxieties recruits face in their early days in the organization. The induction programs rarely address the issues individuals must cope with fitting into the new organization. I carried the invaluable lesson I learnt from helping Tito deal with the anxiety he must have faced in his initial days with us to companies I got professionally associated with. I would urge the HR function to pay particular attention to the induction program and design it with the purpose of putting recruits at ease with their new environment.
———–
The article is from the book: Tito: fun-filled tales of a companion dog at IIMA which is a collection of eighteen short stories, narrated in the beautiful setting of IIMA’s heritage campus, about a companion dog that captured the hearts of campus residents and visitors with his unbounded zest for life.
https://www.nijikart.com/products/book-tito
https://www.amazon.in/Tito-fun-filled-tales-companion-IIMA/dp/8195718000