Read The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout for Free Online Page A

their dogs are charter members of a dog-walking group that meets at 7:30 a.m. most mornings, even in winter, at a town-owned farm near our house. In mid-July, after Scout received the puppy shots due when she turned thirteen weeks old, Marian and Clyde invited us to join the group. The point of this morning session is to give the dogs exercise by letting them gambol, without leashes, in the acres of lush meadowland owned by our town. The pristine white farmhouse, the ponds filled with flowering yellow water lilies in spring through fall, and the old covered wooden bridge on the property make it look a lot like one of those gorgeous Monet paintings.
    On any given morning in July, we saw as many as a dozen dogs walking off-leash with their owners. Besides Cyon and Bunny, the regulars included Olive, a black pug whose smushed face made it hard for her to breathe in the summer heat; Sadie, an older Airedale; and Viggo, a huge, seven-month-old German
shepherd who was being trained by a woman named Lee Gibson to become a seeing-eye dog for the blind. Lee had agreed to give Viggo a loving home and his early puppy training, but when he turned a year old he would be leaving her to begin his formal training in a guide-dog program. Lee also had an extremely shy Japanese chin named Zen, who sometimes walked with us but usually preferred to wait by himself next to Lee’s car.
    These daily outings taught us far more about how to raise Scout than the monks and our other books did. Lee, for one, knows an enormous amount about dogs and was a fount of training tips. The visits to the farm socialized us, too. Clyde instructed us to guard our knees when the dog pack came running our way. “You could blow out a knee and wind up in the hospital again, Jill,” he warned me. He also encouraged me to buy a pair of Muck Boots like his to keep my feet dry in the mornings, when the grass was still covered with dew.
    Following the death of the film director John Hughes that summer, we dubbed our little group of early morning dog walkers the Breakfast Club. Especially if Scout had had one of those nights when she needed to be let out a lot, I was often exhausted, but I cherished those morning meetings. Soon I could match the cars to the pet owners, and I would be disappointed
if we drove up to the parking area and didn’t immediately see any of our friends.
    Day by day, Scout became bolder—and bigger. “Scout, you’ve grown another six inches,” Clyde would exclaim nearly every morning, and it almost seemed true. She was eating like crazy, gulping down her kibble with a frosting of yogurt and gaining about half a pound a day. When she arrived in Connecticut in mid-June, Scout had weighed sixteen pounds; by late July she weighed almost thirty pounds. As she grew, Cyon, Bunny, and the rest of the pack sternly enforced what Scout could get away with (joining them in chasing rabbits) and what she couldn’t (dashing into the pile of discarded vegetables). Sometimes the other dogs were plainly annoyed by this overeager puppy who followed their every move and tried to steal their balls. Viggo could be particularly grouchy, and sometimes he would turn on Scout and give her a “stay away from me” growl. But though Scout clearly didn’t enjoy this sort of rejection, she needed to learn how to interpret social cues.
    Marian continued to be amused by Scout’s wild and ungainly strides, but her demeanor around all the dogs was relaxed yet firm. If Cyon began to race off into the woods, Marian would immediately call her back. A sharp “Cyon, come!” would result in the prompt reappearance of her dog. If Bunny and Scout had
followed Cyon, they would dawdle behind her with mildly guilty expressions. Afterward, Marian would get all three dogs to sit and take out her bag of small treats. “Wait,” she’d tell them, wanting to encourage soft mouths and keep them sitting. Only then would she give them each a treat. The Breakfast Club ended each morning