A few weeks into the animal quarantine experience, it became clear that there are ways to optimize this experience for your pup. Here are my top recommendations for how to hack and optimize your possibly 120-days of Hawaiian puppy import quarantine.
1) Fly in a soft-sided crate if you’re flying your pup in-cabin… but bring the puppy the cheapest hard-sided crate you can get your hands on for their quarantine stay, and take the door off of it. Be prepared to throw this thing away after your quarantine is pau (done). Trust me when I say– you will NOT want anything that remained on the ground in your dog’s kennel to cross the threshold into your home. Why? Because it is going to reek of the piss-shit smell no matter what you try to do to keep things sanitary. You’ll want to take the door off of the crate so that the dog can go in and out for sleep without the door accidentally swinging shut. The cheapest place I know to acquire dog crates is places like Ross or TJ Maxx. I recommend the fully made of plastic kind, not metal.
2) Ask the staff to place the dog’s bed and the hard-sided crate in the back covered portion of the kennel; and put a blanket, old towel, or the cheapest crate pad you can get your hands on inside the crate. This is where they will sleep.
2.5) I originally thought I might provide his little wave lovey-blanket that I (ok this is lightweight gross but also smart) used as a sweat rag for a couple days before I got him to make it smell like me. And he would sleep with this me-scented lovey blankie every single day in his crate when I first got him. It may have aided in him being crate trained since no joke, night 1 together. So it seemed like a logical thing to leave him with in animal quarantine. But when I realized that everything in quarantine would be covered in piss/shit residue from daily hosings, the lovey swiftly came home with me. And when he came finally home, he found his little wave lovey blanket from puppyhood waiting in his at-home crate which he now sleeps in every night.
3) Bring your dog two (2) blankets to sleep with; or two old towels you dgaf about, which you will be rotating every 48 hours. It does get cool, breezy, and rainy at night in Hawaii, believe it or not. People think it’s just always hot and humid 24/7 here– false. Even though Nalu was quarantined through the summer months, it still got cool and rainy sometimes, particularly at night. As we reached the second half of his quarantine stay, I really started to notice the cooler nights, and realized my little chicken nugget might be shivering his little not-yet-descended balls off at night. Dogs have higher body temperatures than humans; and puppies don’t regulate their body temperature as well as adult dogs. So I bought Nalu Petco’s $6 faux sherpa blanket which you can find here; and without realizing it, I struck gold on this idea. Here’s why.
My initial intention was just to save money b/c I’m what we call here in Hawaii “pake”, or cheap AF. My goal as a new dog mama was to save as much money as humanly possible in his first year of life (which is another post that’s coming). But what made this cheap fake sherpa blanket so great is that not only was it light yet warm, but it washed beautifully. And you are going to want to wash your dog’s blanket about once every two days. That wasn’t a typo– you will need to be bringing the dog blanket home to wash every 48 hours because it is uncontrollably going to get soiled with your dog’s piss and shit residue. This is why you’re going to buy two of the exact same blanket, and rotate them out every 48 hours– one with puppy, one at home drying on the line.
That being said, you will also want to invest in a cheap smell-proof container that you put all of his soiled linens in for the car ride home. This might be gallon ziplock bags, or in my case I used Tupperware that I was prepared to throw away. I drive an SUV so I couldn’t put his soiled stuff in the trunk; and if they smelled especially bad, my whole car would rapidly smell like dog piss.
More on the blankets…
In our case, baby boy actually had the instinctual habit of peeing on his blankets on purpose. Why would he do this, you might wonder? Because boy dogs are territorial creatures. That puppy thought he was king of the castle in that kennel, to the fullest. And the thing is, the staff go through and they hose down and deep clean the kennels every day with water and at least once a week with sanitizing agents. Which means they are washing away the urine and doo doo where the dog is trying to stake his claim. Not to mention, lord only knows how many other dogs once used that kennel or that facility dog bed; and what history of smells reside in those things. Every time he would shishi (pee) on his blanket, the quarantine people would pick up the blanket and hang it on the fencing of his kennel, instead of leaving it down. And I think this just fueled the habit all the more furiously because he was already religiously pee pad trained. To this very day he is a dog who likes to claim what is his and to bury things that he knows can get taken away. He would also hide his toys under the bed at quarantine.
When a dog’s living environment is unpredictable and new, it creates anxiety; and that anxiety is going to be expressed. In his case, he expressed his anxiety/ territorial claim/ “mine” by peeing on the sherpa blankets. This behavior persisted every single day until his quarantine stay was over. But I had a dog mama instinct to let him have the damn blanket, instead of refusing to give him blankets out of fear that he’d pee on them. I had an instinct that he needed something that was his; and something that was also soft and snuggly, which allowed him to express whatever urges he needed to express whilst confined to the unnatural situation of a quarantine kennel.
Someone then gave me the tip to snip off a corner of the sherpa blanket; and when it was time to show him where to pee at my apartment, rub the blanket snippet in those spots. I believe this worked in our favor because once he got home, he peed on the grass outside, and to this very day, never once in his entire life has he peed in my apartment. He went from pee pads in a California house, to quarantine, to maintaining solid dog toileting habits outdoors only. So if your dog wants to pee on his cheap ass $6 fake sherpa Petco blanket, that is the least you can oblige him given the circumstances. Just make sure you take that shishi blanket and rub it in all the spots around your house and neighborhood where you want him to do his business later when he finally comes home.
4) Bring puppy a variety of toys to play with to keep him stimulated cognitively— but there is strategy to this. It’s not just a nylabone and a tennis ball. When you choose what toys to bring him, most of them need to be hard, washable toys made of rubber, that the dog cannot destroy and consume when unsupervised. Nalu used to love this rubber giraffe with a tiny little tennis ball inside of its belly. Well one day when he was alone he managed to dislodge the tennis ball from Giraffie, and proceeded to eat half the tennis ball. Trust me when I say the animal quarantine is NOT the place where you want any medical emergencies to occur. Luckily for us he shit out the tennis ball chunks, but I was definitely terrified that my puppy was about to have a GI blockage thanks to my naïveté around appropriate puppy toys for animal quarantine
I recommend a rubber kong, some nylabones, and maybe a feeder-type hard toy. These may be ‘permanent’ toys that stay down for puppy to use at their discretion; and they will get hosed down and sanitized when the staff cleans their kennel.
You may also provide soft toys, BUT you must reserve these for when you visit only. And when you leave, you put them away. Remember that everything that touches the ground is touching urine and fecal residue; so you will also need to bring these home from time to time for a good wash.
Bring your puppy things to chew on when you visit. Nalu enjoyed an assortment of chews from rawhide and bully sticks to chicken feet. We would use these to play fetch for 45 minutes straight, and then he would relax and chew while I groomed his long ass puppy nails. Then the chews were taken home with me. Do NOT leave your edible dog chews in the kennel, both because you don’t want to tease the dog who will be able to smell it, and because you don’t want to attract ants, birds, or vermin.
5) Bring toys that get them moving. Nalu loved fetch and tug of war; so we always had a couple tug of war toy options on hand.
6) Also worth noting, I would bring Nalu natural items to explore, because he was trapped in a kennel for 120 days. Once he was fully vaccinated, I brought in giant sticks for him to smell and other natural matter from my neighborhood. My favorite natural item was when I brought him some pumpkins for halloween (I’m a preschool Montessori teacher, so after the pumpkins were of no use in my class, I brought them to Nalu during one of my visits). Dogs need to learn smells. They use their noses to explore the world the way we use our hands and eyes to explore our world. So the more stuff you can expose your puppy to, the better. What they play with doesn’t always have to be some commercial toy you bought from a pet store, as long as it’s safe and they are supervised.
7) Get them in the routine of practicing obedience commands, wearing their collar during visits, and wearing walking accessories. This should become a regular part of your visits. Nalu remembered 100% of the obedience commands we worked on before quarantine following my own two-week mandated quarantine; and he learned a lot more while we were in there. He learned to roll over during his 120-day quarantine, y’all. He learned to ‘back up’ because of quarantine because I would ask him back up every time I would enter and exit his quarantine kennel so that he didn’t try to run out the kennel after me. I would dress him in his collar and harness every time I visited. I would hook him on his leash and walk him around the kennel. All of this paid off by the time baby boy got home. Just make sure you take off all of their accessories before you leave because they need to be ‘naked’ in their kennel for safety.
8) Bring basic grooming supplies, such as a brush and nail clippers. And get in the habit of grooming on the regular. This is both so that by the time they get home they’re in practice for grooming, and also because the cement floor of the quarantine kennel is like, sandblasted or something, and it’s not going to wear down their puppy nails the way you think it might. The staff wants the whole kennel to be as sanitizable as possible. So if the cement foundation of the kennels was absorbent, that cement would be absorbing years/gallons of dog piss. Long explanation short– you need to groom your dog’s nails regularly.
As a final note, I brought in my own metal S-hook and hung up a cheap tote bag where I stored all of these things in the ‘back’ covered part of his kennel, hung up high and out of reach.
puppy & paradise 