On Realizing Your Chihuahua Runs the House

There is a process by which most chihuahua owners eventually come to acknowledge, in private and without witnesses, that the small dog has acquired a degree of structural authority in the household that the owner did not, on signing the adoption paperwork, sign up for. The process happens in stages. I have, over nine years and three notebooks, identified five.

I want to be clear, before I proceed, that I am not, in any direct sense, complaining. The household runs better than it did. The complaint is more in the nature of an admission. Here are the stages.

Stage 1: Denial

Stage 1 lasts approximately three to seven months after the dog arrives. During Stage 1, you are still operating under the framework you brought home from the breeder or the rescue, in which you are the responsible adult and the dog is a small new addition to your existing routine. You make small accommodations. You buy a small bed. You install a baby gate. You consider these accommodations to be temporary or trivial.

The defining feature of Stage 1 is that you would, if asked, tell a friend that nothing has really changed.

Stage 2: Bargaining

Stage 2 begins when you notice, on a Tuesday at 5:47 p.m., that you have been cooking dinner around a small dog who is asleep on the kitchen floor in the spot where the chopping board would normally go. You move the chopping board. You do not move the dog.

In Stage 2, you begin to negotiate with yourself about which accommodations are really structural and which are merely temporary. You decide, for example, that the small fleece bed at the foot of the couch is structural but that the small fleece bed in your home office is temporary. The small fleece bed in your home office, in fact, never moves.

Stage 3: Research

Stage 3 is the period in which you, the owner, begin to read more about the chihuahua than you would have predicted. You read about common health issues. You read about socialization. You read, on more than one Saturday, the AKC breed standard.

You tell yourself, during Stage 3, that you are reading because you are a responsible owner who wants to understand the dog. This is partly true. The other part, which becomes evident in retrospect, is that you are reading because the dog has, by Stage 3, claimed enough of the household's attention that researching her behavior has become a structural feature of your week.

Stage 4: Acceptance

Stage 4 arrives, in most households, around the eighteen-month mark. In Stage 4, you stop pretending the small bed in your home office is temporary. You stop apologizing to dinner guests when the dog claims the couch first. You begin, on the side, telling other dog owners about the breed with a level of authority that you would have, in Stage 1, found embarrassing.

The defining feature of Stage 4 is that you no longer narrate the dog's behavior to yourself as an interruption to your normal life. The behavior is, by Stage 4, your normal life.

Stage 5: The quiet sincere paragraph

Stage 5 is the long final stage, which lasts approximately the rest of the dog's life. In Stage 5, you have given up the framework of "who runs the household" entirely. The household runs because all of its members, including the small one, occupy specific structural positions, and the structure is fine.

I will plant a sincere paragraph here, because the column requires one and Stage 5 deserves it. The thing about Stage 5 is that, looking back, the small accommodations of Stages 1 through 4 were not, as you had thought at the time, the dog winning. They were the household becoming a slightly more attentive place. The dog was not the problem to be managed; the dog was the small consistent presence around which a kinder household quietly assembled itself. The bond between a small dog and a household is, in retrospect, what Stages 1 through 4 were about.

Why the pattern is real, briefly

I want to plant a small honest paragraph here about why the household-rearrangement pattern is a real phenomenon and not just a column conceit. The behavioral science on dog-human cohabitation, summarized at Companion Animal Psychology and elsewhere, is consistent on the point that dogs, especially small ones with strong attachment bonds, accumulate routines over time and that the household typically accommodates those routines unconsciously. The Stages 1 through 5 framework is, in this sense, a description of the household's slow conscious recognition of an accommodation pattern that was, in fact, happening regardless of whether the household noticed.

This is not, I want to be clear, a claim that the dog is manipulating you. The dog is doing what dogs do, which is to settle into a household and to express small consistent preferences. The household, given enough time, organizes around those preferences. The framework is a way of admitting it.

A short diagnostic, in case you are unsure which stage you are in

If you are not sure which stage you are currently in, here is a small set of diagnostic questions.

• Have you, in the last week, moved a piece of household furniture to accommodate the dog's preferred sun-tracking circuit? (Stage 2 or later.)
• Do you, in any room of the house, have a small fleece bed that you describe to others as "temporary"? (Stage 2.)
• Have you read, voluntarily, more than one article on the AKC chihuahua breed standard? (Stage 3.)
• Do you describe the dog to friends without, in any way, narrating it as a complaint? (Stage 4.)
• If you sit on the couch in the evenings without the dog on your lap, does it feel slightly off? (Stage 5.)

Most of you, by my back-of-envelope estimate, are in Stage 4. The rest of you are in Stage 5 and would, if asked, prefer not to dwell on it. Doris, as I write this, is in the basket. I am, on the available evidence, in Stage 5.