If you’ve found this page because you’re considering getting a puppy and you live in New York City, let me cut to the chase–don’t do it. Consider fostering or dog sitting first, then once you’ve had a taste of dog owning in the city make your decision to get a baby dog. If you’re like me, the main experience you have with dog ownership is the family pet from your childhood in the suburbs. Maybe you’ve done some research on the costs and breeds and shelters, maybe you’ve even reached out to a few people already. Let me tell you what the internet does not: raising a dog in New York City is twice as hard anywhere else, and there’s no guide book for us. I’ve made a brief list of NYC hurdles otherwise unmentioned by handbooks and youtube videos about the first few weeks with your puppy.
your walkup building
– like many New Yorkers, I live in a walkup building, and I’m on the 4th floor. If you don’t paper train your dog (discouraged by experts), please know you will be taking those stairs upwards of 10 flights a day for a few weeks. For me that meant 40 flights of stairs a day. The issue with this is you, the human, are reluctant to take the stairs so you hope the dog will not be barking cause they have to pee. You are wrong and they will make a mess in the apartment. You will then be frustrated, need to take the dog out as the books recommend but not wearing any shoes, no coat, no keys, no mask, no doggie bags, etc. There is mess on the floor and you are holding a wet dog. What do you do?
doing it alone
– this does not apply to everyone but it did apply to me. In the example above, one partner would clean the mess and the other would take out the soaked pup. But alone? Good luck. Its all you all the time. Every success and every failure and let me tell you its like a 1/10 split there at first. Its demoralizing. It feels like you are trapped in a burning house you set fire to.
Puppy Blues are real
– the way we live in NYC is at a breakneck pace. its the city that never sleeps right? In what world does bringing along a barking animal that cant go inside Trader Joe’s and needs to be let out every few hours make sense? It doesn’t. EXCEPTION: if you adopt an older dog who has can hold it better then fine you’re off the hook. Those first few weeks I thought ‘what the fuck have I done, I lived an amazing, responsibility-free life and ran around this incredible city with my friends just tearing up the town. Why did I throw that away?!’ To this the only advice I have is once they’re house trained, things start to feel more manageable. Do your research on the breed, take that information seriously and consider how it would fit into your life.
the trash on the streets
– look, I live in a part of town with several doorman buildings on my block. Its clean! Or so I thought. No your puppy will pick up every tiny piece of trash, gravel, plastic, etc. imaginable. Luckily my dog never cared for other dogs poop but no guarantees there either. I know its against vet advice, but my apartment is too small for an energetic puppy and she was getting house trained so she’s been on the street on walks every day since she arrived. Having to watch out for the garbage is exhausting. This also applies to restaurant patios and parks!
the people on the streets
– my god. you’d think no New Yorker has ever seen a puppy in their life. I couldn’t go 10 feet without being stopped because they wanted to pet her. I’m fine with that, I knew it’d be a side effect of having a golden retriever, but I was not emotionally prepared to go from talking to my 12 friends and the occasional person behind a counter, to talking to 50+ people a day about the age/breed/name of my dog and also their sob story about their 16 year old boxer who died a decade ago. its so much. Wearing a ball cap helps, big sunglasses or big headphones… don’t make eye contact and show no mercy when you hear the passer by say to their friend “ohmygosh LOOK!! SO CUTE”
the weather
– it has been an actual miracle that in the first 5 spring-time weeks of having this puppy, it only really rained 3 days. any extreme weather is a nightmare but luckily I have yet to deal with snow. its the layering yourself, then dealing with the barking dog. You feel like a firefighter trying to suit up in time. Then after the walk if you, like me, have the stairs to deal with, then you’re holding that sopping wet dog as you trudge up.
NYC dog restrictions
– so your friends have agreed to a park hang so you and the dog can go, amazing! Well guess what, dogs are not allowed in: Sheep’s Meadow, The Great Lawn, The Ramble, Governors’s Island, the water of any NYC beach, Rockaway boardwalk and beach Memorial-Labor Day, all playgrounds, all ball fields, all tennis/basketball courts and they must be on a <6ft leash at all times (with the exception of Central Park that allows dogs to be off-leash before 9am and after 9pm). For further info check out the NYC parks site here.
the elusive “distraction-free training”
– ah, the idealistic dog trainers. “find a quiet place to start working on commands with your dog, like your house. then advance to the back yard, then the sidewalk, and finally introduce more distractions, like 1 dog across the street barking!” LOL are you joking? we can do simple stuff in my apartment but there is no middle ground between zero distractions and the whole world. its exhausting and frustrating cause its not their fault and its also not your fault. the NYC streets are overflowing with distractions, loud noises, weird smells, other dogs, a million people, subway grates, storage hatches, strollers, courier carts, pigeons, puddles and the list goes on. its so much all the time. i eventually found a dorm driveway about a block away that works ok if we go in the evening to practice ‘sit/stay’ from further than 6 ft away but man be prepared to just repeat yourself into exhaustion and hope eventually something sinks in.