Training & Behavior

The roses were my mother's, planted the year I was born, and the dog was not. When I came home to find the middle of the bed dug out in a perfect half-moon, soil flung three feet in every direction, I was ready to be furious. Then I looked at what he'd actually done, and the fury turned into something closer to curiosity.

Buster is a terrier, which is to say his front paws are opinions he can't keep to himself. He'd dug before, always in the same compulsive way, but never at the roses. This hole had a purpose I could read if I squinted. At the bottom, just under the soil line, was the corner of a bone he'd buried in the autumn and forgotten, and next to it, a cool pocket of earth that on a hot day must have felt like the only sensible place in the garden.

I'd been treating the digging as vandalism when it was actually archaeology and air conditioning. The nose had found the old bone, the heat had found the cool soil, and the paws had done what terrier paws are built to do, which is move earth toward a goal. Understanding it didn't un-dig the bed, but it changed how I felt about the next one.

The fix was to give him a place where digging was the point. A corner of the lawn, a pit dug by me, filled with his toys and a treat buried shallow, so the instinct had a home that wasn't my mother's roses. He took to it instantly, as if he'd been waiting for permission, and the crater in the flower bed became a one-off rather than a weekly outrage.

The roses, battered but alive, got a low border after that, not to punish him but to mark the line, because a terrier respects a boundary about as much as he respects a rose, which is to say not at all, unless the boundary is also a game. We made it a game. He digs his pit, I hide the biscuit, the roses get to keep their roots for another year.

I still find the odd excavation near the bed when I've been slack with his pit, and I've stopped seeing it as malice. It's a nose with a plan, and the plan is always the same, find the thing, cool the belly, move the world a little. The roses would prefer he didn't, and mostly now, he doesn't.

My mother, when she saw the crater, laughed the way she laughs at most disasters I cause in her garden, which is to say with a shake of the head and a comment about how the dog has more energy than sense. The roses, battered but alive, got a talking-to from her and a drink from me, and the truce between Buster and the flower bed began the afternoon I stopped treating him as the villain.

The border I built was ugly at first, a ring of stones I hauled from the driveway, but ugly is better than dug, and Buster, who respects a boundary about as much as he respects a rose, tested it exactly once and found the stones less satisfying to move than soil. I planted a few low shrubs inside for good measure, something he couldn't tunnel through without a real argument, and the roses, for the first time in years, made it through a season unmolested.

Terriers, I've come to accept, are a different contract from other dogs. They were built to go to ground, to move earth toward a goal, and no amount of scolding undoes a few hundred years of breeding. The trick isn't to stop the digging, it's to give it a home, a place where the instinct is the point and not the crime, and to mark the places where it isn't welcome with something the paws can't ignore.

The toy pit I dug for him became, oddly, a bonding thing. We bury a biscuit, he excavates, we both get the satisfaction of the hunt without the roses paying for it. He brings me the empty toy afterwards, tail going, as if to say the job's done, and I scratch his ears and we look at the flower bed together, intact, and agree, without words, that this is how it's going to be.

I still find the odd hole near the bed when I've been slack with his pit, and I've stopped seeing it as malice or even mischief. It's a nose with a plan, and the plan is always the same, find the thing, cool the belly, move the world a little. The roses would prefer he didn't, and mostly now, with a pit and a border and a bit of understanding, he doesn't.

If you've a terrier and a garden, make your peace early with the digging, because fighting it directly is a war you'll fight on his terms and lose. Give him the pit, mark the beds, and accept that a dog built to move earth will move it somewhere, and your only real job is to choose where. The roses, against the odds, are still here, and so is the dog, and we've reached an understanding that costs me one corner of lawn and saves me a flower bed my mother planted the year I was born.